Can You Work in Netscape Time?

"Just Enough Management"

Who makes Mike Barbarino labor all night to meet a deadline for MCI? He does. The only people who work this hard are people who want to. The only people who want to are people with enough freedom to do the work they want to do.

Netscape is a company that consciously undermanages. Need proof? Consider the roles of Clark and Andreessen, the two names synonymous with the company's meteoric rise. Neither, it turns out, plays a central management role at Netscape. Clark represents the company to its investors and strategic partners. He says he's at his best as a manager in organizations with fewer than 100 people, and Netscape crossed that threshold long ago.

Andreessen, meanwhile, no longer writes code. Nor does he directly supervise programmers. Instead, he's Netscape's technical visionary and Internet ambassador. He is still a huge presence at the company -- popping in and out of meetings, critiquing code-writing priorities, dreaming up new features for the software, fielding up to 200 e-mail messages a day. But he's not a manager in the conventional sense.

Formal "management" falls to a trio of veteran high-tech executives: 52-year-old President and CEO James Barksdale; 45-year-old engineering chief Rick Schell (Symantec, Borland); 45-year-old general manager James Sha (Oracle, Wyse Technology). All three are clear that their major responsibilities are to set priorities and to establish schedules -- and to stay out of the way.

"Just enough management" is how Andreessen describes the philosophy. "If you overmanage software," he says, "the result is paralysis." Schell compares it to "herding kittens." Tell programmers what to do and they are guaranteed to rebel. And the first casualties of rebellion are productivity and creativity.

The heart of this company -- the people who make Netscape Time tick -- are the rows of young programmers who sit for days at a stretch, absorbed by their work, suspicious of the suits. Programmers like Mike Holst, who boasts that he has "avoided management like the plague" throughout his career. Or Lou Montulli, a Netscape star whose creations include the Amazing Fish Cam, an utterly useless (and thus popular) device through which Web surfers can visit the aquarium in his office. Spiritually at least, Netscape is a place where the inmates run the asylum.

Four Times Faster

Engineering chief Rick Schell gives the ultimate definition of Netscape Time -- turning out new product releases four times faster than the competition. He knows it because he's lived it. Netscape Navigator 1.0, released last December, was designed to run on the Macintosh, Windows, and X Window machines for Unix. Less than three months later, Netscape released Navigator 1.1. This version added a bunch of new features and ran on 32-bit platforms such as Windows NT and the Macintosh PowerPC. Three months later, Netscape released a beta version of Navigator 1.2 designed to run on Windows 95 and announced plans to release the official version two months after that.

And that's just the Navigator. Servers, which range in price from $1,495 to $50,000, roll out the door just as quickly. The Netscape Communications Server is the baseline product with which companies publish hypermedia documents on the Web. The Netscape News Server allows companies to create their own private and public discussion groups. The Netscape Commerce Server allows companies to conduct electronic transactions over the Internet. All told, in its first 15 months, Netscape announced or shipped 11 major new products.

How fast is fast? Clock it against the track records of some other famous names in software. It took Kaleida Labs, the much-ballyhooed joint venture between Apple and IBM, three years to release its ScriptX multimedia programming language. For the last five years, General Magic, another celebrated Apple offspring, has been building a market for its operating system for handheld communicators. Windows 95 was first conceived in 1991 and code-named Windows 93. Four years and countless delays later, Microsoft's new operating system finally hit the market.

To Netscape, these are slow companies. "I don't know anyone that's made it going after a five-year dream," Jim Clark says. Which explains why plans for even the most ambitious new products are not allowed deadlines longer than six months. Time is everything.

"The only competitive advantage is speed," says Jim Sha, the Netscape general manager responsible for integrated applications.

"When you live on the Net," adds Barksdale, "you realize there is very little excuse for delay."

Web Squared

Is the web a technology? Or is the Web a place? Is the Web an experience? Or is the Web a relationship?

Exactly.