If you see a snake, kill the snake, but don’t play with dead snakes.
16 Jul 2005I’ll start this off by saying that I’ve always been interested in the stock markets. I’ve just finished reading the two Fortune.com articles commemorating the 10 years that have passed since Netscape’s IPO in 1995.
Part 1 – Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web
Part 2 – How Netscape Lost Its Way
I’ve read The New New Thing which tells the story of Jim Clark and his progression from SGI to Netscape and ending with an overly ambitious self-navigating yacht. I recommend that anyone interested in the Netscape story (told from 20-odd insiders) check out the two articles above. The quotes that particularily rang true to me have been included below.
Homer: I actually have a little book of Barksdale sayings. Things like “If you see a snake, kill the snake, but don’t play with dead snakes.” That means that if it’s an important issue, discuss it. Resolve it. But once you’ve discussed it and resolved it, don’t bring it up again. We called that the Rule of Snakes. He was a calming influence, yet with a sense of urgency about the business, which is extremely difficult to have in one person. I have a sense of urgency, but no one would ever accuse me of being a calming influence.
*Very true, in a start-up you need everyone focused on the road ahead. *
Eric Hahn: We had products that were hugely popular like Netscape Navigator, whose code was just getting really buggy and really expensive to develop for. Each of the 50 new engineers would pile on and build 50 new things on top of it, but the foundations didn’t support it. That hurt us in the browser war almost as much as the Microsoft free browser did.
That’s a problem I struggle with on a daily basis. It’s the trade-off between moving fast and satisfying short-term goals while trying to prepare for an unknown future. We just don’t have the resources to consider the long-term implication of each decision so we apply the 80/20 rule. A solution should cover 80% of the (common) use-cases and any customer-requested outliers will be considered on an individual basis. This buys us time to devote to ensuring we have a satisfactory foundation to move forward on. However, technologies change (EJB 3.0 is right around the corner) and all software inevitably needs a re-write.
Roger McNamee: The tendency was to blame Microsoft for Netscape’s demise, and that that is just not correct. Microsoft defeated Netscape in the marketplace decisively. It was only able to do so because Netscape abandoned market opportunities in which Microsoft was largely powerless and which came to be dominated by others, in favor of markets in which Microsoft was exceptionally powerful. Microsoft clearly beat Netscape at its own game in browsers but that, in my opinion, is not why Netscape failed. Netscape’s inability or unwillingness to commit itself to the new opportunities enabled by browsers: things like portals, which created Yahoo, like search, which created Google and Overture, like application servers, which created BEA. Netscape’s unwillingness or inability to commit itself to a strategy that revolved around these new categories was the real reason it failed.
Clark: My 20% stake in Netscape was worth $663 million on the day of the IPO. I remember because later I needed to come up with a tail number for an airplane I bought. I told them to use 663, because that meant something to me.
That’s rough.