My neighbour in LA is still dating Marc.
I think your opinion is a popular one. He’s been marketed, at times, as a wunderkind and a technological visionary. I think that, if anything, Netscape’s failure to execute on anything resembling a business strategy lies soundly in his lap and that of Jim Clark. Jim Clark, however, was creative enough to find Netscape a creative and fruitful exit strategy — selling AOL something they really didn’t need.
Netscape failed ’cause they never had a business plan. They lost more sales of the pay version of Netscape to the FREE version of Netscape than they did to Microsoft IE. Microsoft just serves as a useful scapegoat for the fact that Netscape was never gonna make money at selling Web Browser software.
So the real question is, does the market think that Marc Andreesen has credibility? I think they do. In fact, I’ll go out on another limb and predict that Loudcloud will be a surprisingly good IPO this week. There are a lot of people with their fingers on the trigger, and there is a lot of hope out there that technology will once again become the darling.
I think that hope will drive Loudcloud higher, more than numbers and legitimacy. They appear to have a plausible business case and all the right buzzwords for the “back to business” internet economy.
-Ian.
On 3/8/01 9:49 AM, “Eric Woodward”
> any of you valley dwellers know the story behind this one? i will be
> surprised if this one even makes it out, though it seems they are
> doing whatever they have to to get listed. this seems like a classic
> case of IPO, or bankruptcy.
>
> anyone else think andreeson is perhaps one of the most overrated
> entrepreneurs of all time?