Like Bill Gates before him, Mark Zuckerberg is having a ‘Pearl Harbour’ moment
The great thing about history is that it often repeats itself – though not necessarily as Marx envisaged it. Here’s a story about the tech industry that illustrates the point.
Act one begins in the spring of 1993, when Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released the first graphical browser for the emerging world wide web. They called it Mosaic and it was a runaway success because it was the thing that enabled ordinary people to understand what this internet thingy was for. In 1994, Andreessen and Jim Clark set up a company that eventually became Netscape and in October that year released a new, improved browser called Netscape Navigator, which in three months had 75% of the nascent browser market. In August 1995, Netscape went public in a frenzied IPO that triggered the first internet boom.
As their company thrived, Andreessen and co started to muse about an even brighter prospect. If web browsers really were the future, they reasoned, and since the operating system (OS) of a PC was effectively just a life-support system for a browser, who needed a complex and expensive OS such as Microsoft’s MS-DOS?
At this point, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and CEO, woke up. For Microsoft’s core assets were its world-dominant OS and the Office software suite that ran on it. Accordingly, on 26 May 1995, he issued what came to be known as his “Pearl Harbor” memo to all staff about the “internet tidal wave” and how Netscape’s increasing dominance of it represented an existential threat for Microsoft. “One scary possibility being discussed by internet fans,” he wrote, “is whether they should get together and create something far less expensive than a PC which is powerful enough for web browsing.” His conclusion: Microsoft needed to turn on
Read more on theguardian.com
