A decade of Mosaic

Wired News had a brief chat with Marc Andreessen — for you youngsters, the Shawn Fanning of his time — about his thoughts on the tin anniversary of Mosaic.

He seems a tad out-of-touch, though. Demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the strategic purpose of Apple’s Safari, he says:

I think it’s so funny that Apple comes out with a new browser in 2003. Where were you guys six years ago? I wish them the best, but it’s not as if you’re about to see Safari go from 0 percent market share to 47 percent.

For Apple, it hasn’t been funny at all that they were dependent on Microsoft for a critical application (i.e. the browser), and had n oanswer for a critical pieces of the operating system (i.e. a web rendering engine that any application can use). Besides — considering that it’s Mac-only, a marketshare of 47 percent is completely reasonable.

Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle. I look at what happened from 1975 to 1985, the first 10 years of the PC adoption cycle. There was huge over-investment in the early 1980s. In the late 80s there was a huge crash, and the real build-out was from 1990 to 2000. With the Internet, we’re really 10 years into what will ultimately look like a 25-year cycle from invention to full implementation.

Well, that’s an interesting and useful perspective. Let’s forgive him for his uninformed point of view on Safari, okay? [via Studio Log]


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