I’ve never been a fan of the wunderkind, superhuman persona that Marc Andreessen used to have in the press. It struck me as overly idealized and thus false. Last week, for the first time, I heard him speak (on a podcast) and got the chance to gain some insight into what he’s like and what role he really played in the popularization of the Internet.

My impression had been that he must have been a charismatic, talented programmer when he was at the University of Illinois. I remember a story Jim Clark told about deciding that the web was going to be big, wanting to start an Internet company, seeing potential in Mosaic, asking around the NCSA team who was the right person to talk to, and everybody saying Marc was the team star and innovator. (Apparently Marc was the one who first added images to HTML.) From that story it seemed that Marc was good at leading a small pioneering team. Jim brought capital and business experience, and the result was Netscape, for a while a run-away success. Marc fueled that success by being the perfect front man for the press, in addition to helping lead technical innovation at Netscape. For example, according to Marc, Netscape decided that Java was too complex, and came up with Javascript, which today, in combination with XML as Ajax, is an important driver of the new wave of enhanced web applications.

I think of the situation that Marc was in; he was represented as infallibly brilliant and visionary. At the time, there was a perception that people in their 20’s could build and run large companies, or run large departments in large companies. If your name is Michael Dell or Bill Gates then that’s true, but for most people, it takes time to learn about management, and it’s a considerably different skill than technical innovation or vision. When a company is going through such fast growth, there isn’t enough time to learn about management - you need managers who already have the experience, and even then it’s a big challenge to keep a company on course. It was unrealistic to expect Marc to set technical direction, manage a big development organization and also be the public face of the company at the same time. That’s true of most people, and more so of someone who’s just starting out in business. I wonder what role that played in the eventual dissolution/sale of Netscape to AOL.

Subsequently, I was surprised that Marc started Loudcloud to provide outsourced IT services. If his skill set was technical innovation, he didn’t sound like a good fit for a business that’s about sales, operational excellence and cost control. Marc’s fame was helpful in getting press attention, but I doubt he had the time, inclination or skill set to be a feet-on-the-street salesperson, and I don’t see how his other skills would have helped.

So was Marc a one-hit wonder? He led the development of NCSA Mosaic. He founded Netscape, which improved upon Mosaic and spurred Microsoft to action, but Netscape ultimately failed as a company. Subsequent efforts, such as Loudcloud, seem to have have fizzled.

After listening to Marc talk yesterday, I’d conclude he was not a one-hit wonder. The problem is more in how we tend to create heroes with images that are impossible to live up to. Marc seems to be an idea person. He gets excited about technical directions and pursues them, but he’s often wrong. (He thought Java was the future for cross-platform application development tool, but “write once, run anywhere” became “write once, debug everywhere” as Java on PCs failed to live up to its promise.) What differentiates him from others is that he has more ideas and from time to time he is right. When a technology like Java doesn’t live up to its stated goal, he’s open to thinking about how to change it, as Netscape did by coming up with Javascript. It was evident listening to him talk about PHP and Ruby that he’s still engaged in tracking technologies and coming up with ideas about how things might and ought to evolve.

So who is Marc? He seems to be a smart, innovative thinker who is good at developing new software and talking to the press. He had an important role in the popularization of the Internet. But he can’t spin straw into gold. There’s more to business success than strength in a couple of areas, and one-time success is hard to replicate. The press and all of us who are influenced by it would do well to remember that the next time someone is hailed as a technology and business visionary and leader.

One final thought - after years of reading articles about Marc, I learned more about him as a person and a technologist in one 45-minute podcast than the sum of all I had read before. A couple of days later I listened to Dan Bricklin talk about his long history recording audio, and he had the same thought: there’s something quite powerful about the spoken word that changes the way that people are listened to and perceived.

Is my impression accurate? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It’s certainly not complete. At best it represents a portion of the whole picture. But it is remarkable how much one can observe about a person when hearing them speak.

Posted by Roger Greene
digg this add to del.icio.us add to My Web Furl this page

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://156.21.1.19/mt-tb.cgi/1449