Section 1.3. Netscape

1.3. Netscape

Jim Clark, the highly successful founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), saw commercial possibilities in Mosaic and the Web, so in April 1994 he created Mosaic Communications Corporation (after wooing Marc Andreessen and several other former employees of NCSA), intending to create, market, and sell web browsers, web servers, and associated services and software. On October 13, 1994, the fledging company released the first public beta of its new browser, called Mosaic Netscape. The browser was available at no cost to individuals and academic users and at a cost of $99 per user to businesses (that seems like a crazy price now, but remember that this was 1994, when the Web was new and before Microsoft had made free browsers the norm). The University of Illinois complained, however, that it held a trademark on "Mosaic," forcing Clark and Andreessen to change the name of their company to Netscape Communications Corporation in November 1994.

Stealing the spotlight

Netscape and Internet Explorer soon took all the attention away from Mosaic-so much so that NCSA stopped all development on Mosaic in January 1997, long after the browser had stopped being widely used.

The newly renamed company proceeded in its goal: to write a web browser from scratch, something that would be better than Mosaic, something that would crush Mosaic like Godzilla crushed Tokyo. The codename of this new browser? Mozilla, a combination of "Mosaic-killer" and "Godzilla." To commemorate the new name, whimsical illustrations of a green lizard began making an appearance around the Web.

Netscape released its web browser, officially named Navigator 1.0 but commonly known simply as Netscape, in December 1994, and it took off like a rocket (see [click here] for a screenshot of that first official release).

Inflating the bubble

It's now accepted as almost a truism that Netscape's astoundingly successful IPO in August 1995 inaugurated the tech-stock bubble of the late `90s. Michael Malone, writing in Forbes on March 7, 2002, spoke for many when he stated that "Crucial to any tech boom is the appearance of the big, stimulus IPO. The last time around, it was Netscape, which went public to such a financial earthquake that it set the pattern for the thousand dot-coms that followed" (http://www.forbes.com/columnists/2002/03/07/0307malone.html ).

Netscape was a better browser than Mosaic and was available for an amazing variety of operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS, Linux, OS/2, Solaris, BSD, IRIX, AIX, and HP-UX. The company and its browser were featured in countless articles and news stories as the Internet and the Web became household words; in fact, for many people, Netscape was the Internet. Soon Netscape Navigator held over 90% of the market share for web browsers, and users excitedly began to play with the betas of what would become Netscape Navigator 2.0. Netscape was on top of the world...

And then Microsoft entered the picture.