Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft
Sitting at your desk, not getting much done, you finally give in to the temptation and click onto www.coolwaytokilltime.com. Little do you know, as you check on the price of cattle futures in Bolivia, that you have Jim Clark to thank for this wonderful research tool and time waster. Clark didn't invent the Internet (that was the Pentagon, looking for an inscrutable way to transmit classified information--or Al Gore, if you can believe him) or even the World Wide Web (that was a Swiss researcher named Tim Berners-Lee). Nor did he invent the first Web browser with a graphical interface; that was a pair of University of Illinois computer geeks named Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. What Clark did was team up with Andreessen to create Netscape, and their first product, Netscape Navigator, made the Net more universally accessible than it had ever been. It also made a lot of people really rich, a fact Clark dwells on in perhaps too much detail.The story of Netscape alone is thrilling enough, but Clark also gives tremendous insight into the real way American business operates nowadays--the speed, the risks, and the hatred for rivals (lotsof hatred, mostly for Microsoft and Bill Gates.) Most of the book covers the founding of Netscape Communications, but there's an epilogue, too, discussing the merger of Netscape with America Online, the ongoing battle with Microsoft, and, most important, the impact the Web has had on everyday life. Clark makes a sound argument that Netscape had a lot to do with that. Oh, and did you know it made him rich?--Lou Schuler