Web as we know it. Finally, as people began to use these Web pages for electronic commerce, SSL was created to provide security for Web-based transactions.
As browsing and the Internet in general grew, Netscape wanted to make sure that Microsoft, with its huge market dominance, would not be able to shift these Web protocols from open to proprietary standards that only Microsoft's servers would be able to handle. “Netscape helped to guarantee that these open protocols would not be proprietary by commercializing them for the public,” said Andreessen. “Netscape came along not only with the browser but with a family of software products that implemented all these open standards so that the scientists could communicate with each other no matter what system they were on-a Cray supercomputer, a Macintosh, or a PC. Netscape was able to provide a real reason for everyone to say, 'I want to be on open standards for everything I do and for all the systems I work on.' Once we created a way to browse the Internet, people wanted a universal way to access what was out there. So anyone who wanted to work on open standards went to Netscape, where we supported them, or they went to the open-source world and got the same standards for free but unsupported, or they went to their private vendors and said, 'I am not going to buy your proprietary stuff anymore... I am not going to sign up to your walled garden anymore. I am only going to stay with you if you interconnect to the Internet with these open protocols.'”
Netscape began pushing these open standards through the sale of its browsers, and the public responded enthusiastically. Sun started to do the same with its servers, and Microsoft started to do the same with Windows 95, considering browsing so critical that it famously built its own browser directly into Windows with the addition of Internet Explorer. Each realized that the public, which suddenly could not get enough of e-mail and browsing, wanted the Internet companies to work together and create one interoperable network. They wanted companies to compete with each other over different applications, that is, over what consumers could do once they were on the Internet-not over how they got on the Internet in the first place. As a result, after quite a few “format wars” among the big companies, by the late 1990s the Internet computing platform became seamlessly integrated. Soon anyone was able to connect with anyone else anywhere on any machine. It turned out that the value of compatibility was much higher for everyone than the value of trying to maintain your own little walled network. This integration was a huge flattener, because it enabled so many more people to get connected with so many more other people.
There was no shortage of skeptics at the time, who said that none of this would work because it was all too complicated, recalled Andreessen. 'Tou had to go out and get a PC and a dial-up modem. The skeptics all said, 'It takes people a long time to change their habits and learn a new technology.' [But] people did it very quickly, and ten years later there were eight hundred million people on the Internet.“ The reason? ”People will change their habits quickly when they have a strong reason to do so, and people have an innate urge to connect with other people,“ said Andreessen. ”And when you give people a new way to connect with other people, they will punch through any technical barrier, they will learn new languages-people are wired to want to connect with other people and they find it objectionable not to be able to. That is what Netscape unlocked.“ As Joel Cawley, IBM's vice president of corporate strategy, put it, ”Netscape created a standard around how data would be transported and rendered on the screen that was so simple and compelling that anyone and everyone could innovate on top of it. It quickly scaled around the world and to everyone from kids to corporations.“
In the summer of 1995, Barksdale and his Netscape colleagues went on an old-fashioned road show with their investment bankers from Morgan Stanley to try to entice investors around the country to buy Netscape stock once it went public. “When we went out on the road,” said Barksdale, “Morgan Stanley said the stock could sell for as high as $14. But after the road show got going, they were getting such demand for the stock, they decided to double the opening price to $28. The last afternoon before the offering, we were all in Maryland. It was our last stop. We had this caravan of black limousines. We looked like some kind of Mafia group. We needed to be in touch with Morgan Stanley [headquarters], but we were somewhere where our cell phones didn't work. So we pulled into these two filling stations across from each other, all these black limos, to use the phones. We called up Morgan Stanley, and they said, 'We're thinking of bringing it out at $31.' I said, 'No, let's keep it at $28,' because I wanted people to remember it as a $20 stock, not a $30 stock, just in case it didn't go so well. So then the next morning I get on the conference call and the thing opened at $71. It closed the day at $56, exactly twice the price I set.”
Netscape eventually fell victim to overwhelming (and, the courts decided, monopolistic) competitive pressure from Microsoft. Microsoft's decision to give away its browser, Internet Explorer, as part of its dominant Windows operating system, combined with its ability to throw more programmers at Web browsing than Netscape, led to the increasing slippage of Netscape's market share. In the end, Netscape was sold for $10 billion to AOL, which never did much with it. But though Netscape may have been only a shooting star in commercial terms, what a star it was, and what a trail it left.
“We were profitable almost from the start,” said Barksdale. “Netscape was not a dot-com. We did not participate in the dot-com bubble. We started the dot-com bubble.”
And what a bubble it was. “Netscape going public stimulated a lot of things,” said Barksdale. “The technologists loved the new technology things it could do, and the businesspeople and regular folks got excited about how much money they could make. People saw all those young kids making money out of this and said, 'If those young kids can do this and make all that money, I can too.' Greed can be a bad thing-folks thought they could make a lot of money without a lot of work. It certainly led to a degree of overinvestment, putting it mildly. Every sillier and sillier idea got funded.”
What was it that stimulated investors to believe that demand for Internet usage and Internet-related products would be infinite? The short answer is digitization. Once the PC-Windows revolution demonstrated to everyone the value of being able to digitize information and manipulate it on computers and word processors, and once the browser brought the Internet alive and made Web pages sing and dance and display, everyone wanted everything digitized as much as possible so they could send it to someone else down the Internet pipes. Thus began the digitization revolution. Digitization is that magic process by which words, music, data, films, files, and pictures are turned into bits and bytes-combinations of Is and Os-that can be manipulated on a computer screen, stored on a microprocessor, or transmitted over satellites and fiber-optic lines. It used to be the post office was where I went to send my mail, but once the Internet came alive, I wanted my mail digitized so I could e-mail it. Photography used to be a cumbersome process involving film coated with silver dug up from mines halfway across the world. I used to take some pictures with my camera, then bring the film to the drugstore to be sent off to a big plant somewhere for processing. But once the Internet made it possible to send pictures around the world, attached to or in e-mails, I didn't want to use silver film anymore. I wanted to take pictures in the digital format, which could be uploaded, not developed. (And by the way, I didn't want to be confined to using a camera to take them. I wanted to be able to use my cell phone to do it.) I used to have to go to Barnes & Noble to buy and browse books, but once the Internet came alive, I wanted to browse for books digitally on Amazon.com as well. I used to go to the library to do research, but now I wanted to do it digitally through Google or Yahoo!, not just by roaming the stacks. I used to buy a CD to listen to Simon and Garfunkel-CDs had already replaced albums as a form of digitized music-but once the Internet came alive, I wanted those music bits to be even more malleable and mobile. I wanted to be able to download them into an iPod. In recent years the digitization technology evolved so I could do just that.
Well, as investors watched this mad rush to digitize everything, they said to themselves, “Holy cow. If everyone wants all this stuff digitized and turned into bits and transmitted over the Internet, the demand for Web service companies and the demand for fiber-optic cables to handle all this digitized stuff around the world is going to be limitless! You cannot lose if you invest in this!”
And thus was the bubble born.
Overinvestment is not necessarily a bad thing-provided that it is eventually corrected. I'll always remember a
