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.
