Can You Work in Netscape Time?

Now Clark and Andreessen wanted to turn The Next Big Thing into The Next Big Business. But successfully launching the Netscape Navigator meant overthrowing its predecessor. Hence their new software's code name: Mozilla, the monster that would slay Mosaic.

The good news, according to Jon Mittelhauser, 25, one of the original refugees who left Illinois to join Clark and Andreessen, was that Mosaic "really wasn't a very good first-generation browser." For all its revolutionary virtues, the program was slow, lacked many basic security features, and did not allow for especially rich document layouts.

The bad news is that technical merit seldom determines who wins and loses the competitive race. Being first is more important than being best. And Mosaic was first. By the fall of 1994, it had become a fundamental tool for as many as 3 million users of the Web; it was adding up to 600,000 users a month. Every week that went by made slaying Mosaic that much more daunting.

How to focus the energy of the troops on this all-or-nothing mission? Forget stock options, urged Andreessen, the group's technical and spiritual leader. Let's get personal. Andreessen pledged that if his colleagues could deliver the first commercial version of the Netscape Navigator by the end of 1994, less than one month away, he would do two of three things -- none of which would come easily to this stocky, slightly pasty, aficionado of fast cars and Pepperidge Farm cookies. One, he would strap on roller blades. Two, he would wear Spandex. Three, he would eat health food.

Hardly the stuff from which great leaps forward come. Except at a company full of 24-hour-a-day programming machines who ate whatever they could scoop from garbage cans stuffed with peanut butter cups and cereal; who blew off steam with midday games of roller hockey; and who alternated between amusement and anxiety at the pressures under which they operated.

November turned to December. Netscape turned from an office to a dormitory. Programmers crashed in their cubicles -- or, if they needed "real" rest, in the futon room. Jamie Zawinski's 130-hour weeks became the norm. Mike Barbarino, who worked on the Windows version of the Navigator (and who, now 35, is an old man by Netscape standards), spent 7 days a week at the office and slept on a futon for only 3 or 4 hours a night. On one of the few nights he was actually at home, programmer Lou Montulli, 24, received a call from a survey company researching work habits. When he told the researcher how many hours he had been working (110 to 120 per week), the worried researcher responded that his computer would not allow him to enter a figure that high.

But the never-let-up atmosphere paid off. On December 15, Netscape shipped the first commercial version of the Navigator. It was pay-up time for Andreessen. He arrived at an all-hands meeting in the company cafeteria, ankles wobbling, a pair of roller blades on his feet, a pair of acrylic shorts hugging his buttocks. Then, with great fanfare, he downed a healthy helping of tofu. Three for three.

Within four months, the dimensions of Netscape's win became apparent. With no advertising -- with no sales in retail outlets -- a stunning 6 million copies of the Netscape Navigator were already in use. Users simply downloaded the software directly from the Internet. Netscape was calling the shots.

Mosaic, if not already dead, was mortally wounded. Back in the fall of 1994, while the Netscape crew was still furiously writing code, visitors using the Mosaic browser accounted for 60% of all the traffic on the Web. By the spring of 1995, the Netscape Navigator accounted for more than 75% of all Web visitors. Mosaic accounted for just 5%. "If we had been six months later," Jim Clark mused, "we would have been lost in noise." Instead, by delivering on time, Netscape created a new browser standard for the Web.

Mozilla ruled. The competitive landscape had been redrawn. Jamie Zawinski could get a decent night's sleep.

Netscape Time

Establishing a standard is different from establishing a brand. Launching a phenomenon is different from launching a product. Producing a movement is different from producing a profit.

You do it in a different way and a different time -- you do it in Netscape Time.

Netscape Time is only partly about speed, although it is most certainly about that. It's also a genetic endowment, an operating system cooked into the DNA of hungry young programmers going about their work. It is as much a mind-set as a business model. Part paranoid, part predator, it shapes everything Netscape does. It's hardwired into how a company in overdrive -- a company whose headcount, in 15 months, has gone from 2 to 330 with little sign of slowing down -- recruits and evaluates talent. It shapes its uniquely interactive relationship with customers. And it explains its coevolutionary relationship with the technology itself -- how Netscape uses the Web to win control of the Web.

In this bifurcated economy, where tired, sclerotic organizations struggle against long odds to cross the gap between those who get it and those who don't, Netscape Time is the defining birthright of a company born on the right side of the Great Divide. Indeed, in an economy where even breakthrough technologies become obsolete within a few years, where even the deadliest competitors must change their game in the face of changing circumstances, Netscape Time may be the company's most enduring invention.

These are its core principles.