Netscape communications

Netscape Communications

• Founders: James H. Clark and Marc Andreessen.
• Distinction: Rewrote rules for Net navigation and initial public offerings.
• Primary Products: Internet browser, Web portal, online development tools.
• Annual Sales: $447.8 million.
• Number of Employees: 2,936.
• Major Competitors: Lycos, Microsoft, Yahoo!
• Senior Vice President & General Manager, Netscape Netcenter: Jim Martin; Senior Vice President, Netscape Enterprise Group: Steve Savignano.
• Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
• Year Founded: 1994.
• Web site: www.netscape.com.


In the beginning, a trip into cyberspace was no piece of cake. Your modem crawled along. You needed expertise in mysterious electronic procedures, such as FTP and TelNet. Your connections failed constantly, and when they didn’t, your computer crashed. The early Net was undeniably great, but it also was not ready for prime time. It didn’t get there until 1994, when Tim Berners-Lee and researchers at the University of Illinois unveiled a new way to convey data online. They developed a new software program dubbed “Mosaic” that helped everyone access it.
The pioneering combination has already paved the way for everything—from America Online to online banking. It also led directly to Netscape Navigator, a commercial version of Mosaic from its original developers. A Fortune 500 computer executive immediately took the burgeoning cyber-community by storm—because his product worked as advertised, could be downloaded for free from the Web, and was the only player in a game that suddenly had everyone’s attention.
More than 6 million copies of Netscape’s new application were put into use within six months of its availability. And the company—much like the Web—took off. Less than 10 months later, it executed one of the most extraordinary initial public offerings in Wall Street history. Five million shares of its stock went on sale at $28, double the initial estimate. And in one day the stock soared as high as $78 before closing at $58. The company turned its first quarterly profit four months later, the share price reached $170, and market capitalization hit an astonishing $5 billion. Netscape responded by enhancing the online site that its browser pointed new users to automatically, quickly making it one of the Web’s most visited. It also kept producing updates of the browser itself and related products aimed at businesses and Internet developers.
By its second birthday, some 38 million individuals were using Navigator and the business world’s top companies were commercial clients. This naturally caught the attention of Bill Gates and his crew at Microsoft, which answered with a similar application of their own.
The rest, as they will be saying for years, is history.

Netscape was founded in April 1994, a few months after Dr. James H. Clark was unceremoniously forced out of the computer systems company that he started 12 years earlier. Angry with his treatment at the Mountain View, Calif.-based Silicon Graphics, and in search of new challenges, Clark hooked up with 23-year-old Marc Andreessen from the University of Illinois on the recommendation of a friend. Andreessen was a creator of Mosaic, the new Web-accessing software developed at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He had left the Urbana-Champaign campus for Silicon Valley after calls to commercialize the graphical interface browser fell on deaf ears. Like Clark, he now felt he had something to prove.
The two hit it off immediately. Their first idea, a venture to put Nintendo games online, didn’t pan out. Andreessen then suggested that they develop an application to compete with Mosaic, an idea he had previously rejected out of hand. Clark, impressed with the early Web’s possibilities, enthusiastically agreed. They recruited much of Andreessen’s programming team from the original project, and a round-the-clock effort kicked off in new offices not far from Clark’s old Mountain View stomping grounds. By October they posted an experimental version of their “Netscape Network Navigator” on the Web, and online denizens began eagerly downloading the exciting new software “available for all popular desktop environments.”
Much like a lot of software developed during the early days of the Internet, Netscape’s products were based on so-called “open standards” that worked with virtually any operating system. Coupled with a price that started at $39 (but was quickly dropped to nothing), it proved a perfect fit. Navigator was a bona fide hit before the company’s first anniversary. And it brought in James L. Barksdale— former chief executive at AT&T Wireless Services—to guide it to the next level as president and CEO. The future looked so bright, in fact, the company also decided to go public even though it was just 16 months old and had never shown a profit. The resultant initial public offering on August 9, 1995, was one of the most successful that the stock market had ever hosted. Netscape followed with its first profit, an updated browser, and a press release announcing that its products were now used by 15 million people around the world and more than 70 companies in the Fortune 100.
Things seemed to pick up in 2000, with Netcenter registration soaring to 25 million, along with the Netscape 6 browser grabbing good reviews. But Netscape’s market share had by then fallen to 30 percent, and an existing agreement between Microsoft and AOL ironically still made Internet Explorer its default browser. No matter the eventual outcome, though, Netscape’s pivotal role in Internet history already has been sealed.