Sunday, April 20, 2003

How Marc Became Marc I was on the W3C site recently (searching for some info on web standards) and came upon Tim Berners-Lee's home page. Fun reading. Tim is responsible for a lot more than he gets (or takes) credit for. I highly recommend browsing through it for some good information about the history of the web. I was particularly taken by a section of his FAQ that described an aspect of web history I had forgotten about over time. Like many early web people, I was first introduced to it via NCSA's Mosaic. Most of the story of Marc Andreessen's development of Mosaic (and then Netscape) has been rehashed ad nauseum. But in his FAQ, Tim Berners-Lee writes: Marc followed up his and Eric's coding with very fast 24hr customer support, really addressing what it took to make the app easy and natural to use, and trivial to install.... Marc marketed Mosaic hard on the net, and NCSA hard elsewhere, trying hard to brand the WWW and "Mosaic": "I saw it on Mosaic" etc. There were a number of browsers available, as far back as the early 90's. But Marc focused much of his efforts on the customer experience (easy install and support) and marketed the hell out of his software. None of the browsers back then were particularly good (by today's standards), for instance trying to stop a web page from loading would often crash the browser. But in trying to differentiate a product (as Marc knew back then), it was often the other stuff that mattered as much as the code itself. This is an important lesson for today's entrepreneurs. In these post-bubble times of tight capital markets, a number of companies are going it alone, financing their launch out of their own pockets. But even with little cash (remember, Marc and his group were college students) there is much you can do to differentiate your product beyond just good coding. As we've stated before on this site, software is increasingly becoming a commodity but good service will always be valuable. Update: As David pointed out to me right after I wrote this piece, NCSA is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Mosaic's release this month. [VentureBlog] Ah, this resonates for me so much. One of my biggest complaints about p2p and weblog software is how difficult it is to install and set up. Someone will do for aggregator software what Marc did for browser software. Interesting that he tried to brand the experience. Interesting also that he thinks so little of weblogs when it's really just an extension of his own vision for Mosaic. 1:36:21 PM

What's the point of all this? Like many bloggers, I've been wondering what the purpose of my weblog should be. And I'm currently focused on two issues. First, i want to tell stories here. Good stories, stories that make you laugh, and stories that make you think. I know that I have a long way to go on this, but there's nothing like real experience to help me improve. Second, I've been thinking about the difference between bloggers who are very prolific, and bloggers who simply forward on other weblog content. And I've come to the conclusion that both are worthy approaches. Commentary, either sparse or flowing, is the information source, while logs of interesting websites are information routers. Jon Udell wrote about this just last week. Reading his perspective helped me crystalize my own. So in the short term, I'll be posting about various things as I think they merit routing, and I'll comment on things when I have something additional to say. As I approach the ending of my UoPhx studies, I'm looking forward to having more time to comment as well as route. 1:13:43 PM

Shopping with Jackson Yesterday, at the market, Paulette said "It's fun to go shopping with Jackson, because then it doesn't look like I'm talking to myself." 1:00:40 PM