LEVY: What was your goal in creating Mosaic?
ANDREESSEN: We just said, “This needs to exist. Somebody needs to do this.” At that time nobody took the Internet seriously. People said it’s a toy for academics. You could get all the physics abstracts you wanted, but if you actually wanted to, like, read the news, it was impossible. And it was still way too hard to use. There was a text-based browser that kept crashing. And the rest of it required a Ph.D. I think of Mosaic as an arbitrage between the incredible crudeness of the Internet at the time and the richness at the time of the PC.
What was the division of labor at the beginning?
Basically it started out just the two of us, Eric Bina and me. He did the core of the product, everything that went inside the frame, and I did the user interface and networking. One of the interesting things you see in the history of software over and over and over again is that products that one way or another redefine how people think of things tend to be something that a couple kids put together in three months. They just look at the world a slightly different way, and then in retrospect everybody goes, “Oh, of course.” Which is exactly what I did when Napster came out.
One of the most important features you came up with was the BACK button.
That’s one of the things that drives me nuts to this day–it was a hack! Back and forward buttons were strictly temporary until we figured out a better metaphor. We always figured that there would be some other navigation system.
Did you see the commercial potential of the Internet back then?
We just thought the whole thing had to go commercial. Engineers had the viewpoint that the Internet was to be used for serious, serious work, and anything else was pollution. So, you put online something frivolous like NEWS-WEEK magazine or, God help us, a picture of a woman, it would in some way make less significant the other things that were going on. But we were pushing to make all kinds of things possible.
Do you feel the browser war was something Netscape couldn’t win?
It was a war that past a certain point there was no point in winning. People write about Netscape as if it were almost a social movement or a cause. But there was a business underneath it, and we were really focused on building a software company. Once Microsoft really began their attack, Netscape should’ve been out of the browser business. Just whacked it.
So the lesson is?
Stick to businesses where people actually expect you to charge for things.
Do you think there’s anything starting now that will be worth celebrating a 10th anniversary in 2013?
Undoubtedly, but I can almost guarantee that we have no idea what it is. Fundamental change comes out of left field. It has to be an idea that’s viewed as crazy at the time. If any idea looks like a good idea, there’s lots of big companies out there like Microsoft that would already be doing it.
