Waiting on Blockchain’s Netscape Moment

Twenty-four years go, Netscape released the first free, consumer-oriented web browser.

When Netscape launched in 1994, dial-up internet wasn’t even a thing. Millions of teens had yet to know the joys of listening to pirated Linkin Park (from Limewire, duh) while AIM chatting their friends.

Netscape was the spark that turned the World Wide Web into a tool that anyone and everyone felt empowered to use.

Today, the societal impact of the web seems obvious. But that wasn’t always the case.

“By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

From the telephone to the automobile, history is riddled with inventions that were doomed to fail.

But in each instance, there came a pivotal moment when adoption spiked, costs fell, and the benefits became clear. In essence, the innovation had crossed the chasm.

The road to the web’s mass-adoption has a lot of parallels to the blockchain space. Both have the power to radically transform the way we live and interact with one another, but the shift from early adopters to mass-adoption is hard

Below we’ll examine how Netscape paved the way for mass-adoption of the World Wide Web.

Mosaic

The year is 1991.

The “internet phenomenon” has been slowly gaining traction for almost a decade, but primarily among the military, academic professionals, and a small group of skilled programmers.

The Sun is publishing articles like this:

By and large, people don’t understand the power or utility of the World Wide Web. As of November 1992, there were still only 26 websites in the World.

All of this is about to change.

Fast-forward to 1993.

A young Marc Andreessen is studying computer science at the University of Illinois, where he spends most of his time in a research lab called the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Like a stereotypical developer, he stays up late to get lab time in and sleeps well past noon.

During his time at NCSA, Andreessen and fellow student Eric Bina saw an opportunity. The World Wide Web needed to be more widely accessible.

“The Internet worked fine as infrastructural device, but wasn’t friendly enough for people who wanted to do interesting things. So it was primed for someone to come along and try to take all this information and this great networking and pull it together with a graphical interface for the desktop PC.”

- Marc Andreessen

The duo went to work and spent the next three months building Mosaic, one of the first web browsers.

It solved many of the usability issues that had previously prevented adoption.

First, it integrated graphics into the otherwise text-based software (something consumers loved).

Second, Mosaic could be downloaded on the Microsoft Windows operating system (then used on roughly 80% of the computers in the World). Predecessors to Mosaic could only be downloaded on Unix, which was only popular in academic and technical circles.

With these core differentiators, Mosaic launched on January 23, 1993.

User growth and adoption accelerated at previously unheard of rates: “there were 50 known Web servers in January 1993, more than 500 by October, and 1500 by June 1994.”

Put simply, they’d created one of the first consumer friendly access points for the World Wide Web. They had done the impossible — turned clunky infrastructure into a delightful user experience.

“Mosaic’s charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext “links” to other documents. By following the links — click, and the linked document appears — you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition. Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information.”

- Gary Wolfe, October 1994 issue of Wired Magazine

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a clear answer on what the future of the Mosaic would look like. Mosaic had grown out of NCSA, a research lab. It was an academic project trying to function like a business — a business Frankenstein of sorts.

It didn’t “have any of the required people, skills or foundation. It was actually fairly stressful because it wasn’t clear what to do, how to carry it forward, or how to keep it going.”

- Marc Andreessen

NCSA was intent on pursuing a traditional enterprise sales distribution strategy for the browser. They’d sell an enterprise license to companies like Wells Fargo. By July 1994, NCSA was charging a $100,000 license fee plus $5 for each additional copy sold by a licensee.

It wasn’t immediately apparent that this wasn’t the best path forward. After all, the project was making money.

But this strategy put inherent limitations on the adoption of the technology. Access to the browser was silo-ed with specific companies and applications, and often times it had to be paid for.

The NCSA team was trying to cram a revolutionary new product offering into an outdated business model, which resulted in adoption that was respectable but slow.

Andreessen, still affiliated with the project, was about to graduate from the University of Illinois and he was unsure about whether to continue with NCSA.

“There was no reason to stay there. The environment was falling to pieces compared to what it had been, simply because there was this influx of money. The project grew from two people to twenty. It was completely different.”

- Marc Andreessen

In a move that can only be attributed to fate, Jim Clark, having just left Silicon Graphics, was demo-ed a prototype of Mosaic. He immediately knew this had the chance to be his next big venture, and jumped on a plane for Illinois.

The duo went on to found Netscape, while the NCSA pursued an enterprise sales strategy for Mosaic.

Netscape

By Summer 1994 Andreessen and seven of his Mosaic colleagues had joined Netscape (then called Mosaic Communications Corp).

The company had one mission — build a Mosaic killer.

They went to work on their first prototype. All of the code from Mosaic was scrapped, and they focused on building in cross-platform support, speed, and added security.

Interestingly, the company’s internal codename for the browser was “Mozilla,” which stood for “Mosaic Killer.”

Their first web browser, Netscape Navigator (originally Mosaic Netscape 0.9), was launched on October 13, 1994. Within four months of release, it had already taken 75% of the browser market (RIP Mosaic).

By October 1996 users had downloaded 45 million Netscape browsers, a meteoric rise considering that two years ago the web was virtually inaccessible to the average consumer.

Netscape succeed by doing four core things right:

1. They were founded on a belief that the internet should be for everyone;
2. They designed for consumers first;
3. They created a uniform browsing experience across operating systems (read: interoperability); and
4. They made it free.

Netscape IPO

Netscape did more than just revolutionize the internet experience, they also revolutionized the financial model behind massive disruptive companies.

Today, the Silicon Valley norm is for venture-backed tech companies to remain unprofitable well past their IPO (ex: Amazon, Tesla, Twitter, Pandora, Alibaba).

Netscape was one of the first companies to break the convention that a company should or must be profitable prior to IPO.

“Netscape broke the bonds on those kinds of expectations. Netscape was only 16 months old, giving away its product largely, and never turned a profit.”

On August 9th, 1995, Netscape went public with unprecedented fan-fair.

Shares, originally priced at $28, shot up to over $74.00 mid-day, and closed at $58.25. A 107% gain in a single day. For reference — Facebook was up 1% on IPO day, Snapchat rose 44%, and Twitter went up 73%.

Back in Mountain View, Netscape employees were told not to pay attention to the stock price.

Rosanne Siino, then VP of Communications at Nescape, recalls how impossible that seemed. “It was like saying don’t notice the pink elephant dancing in your living room.”

Netscape Legacy

But, alas, everything must come to an end.

A week after the IPO, Microsoft launched a directly competitive product — Internet Explorer.

IE was released on August 16, 1995 and came bundled with with Windows.

Despite the phenomenal early growth of Netscape, this was a distribution strategy that Netscape couldn’t compete with. They had a product that was virtually identical to Internet Explorer, but with an inferior distribution strategy.

As Reid Hoffman writes, “the cold and unromantic fact is: a good product with great distribution will almost always beat a great product with poor distribution.‍”

In November 1998 AOL acquired Netscape, and by 2003 the end had come. Internet explorer had attained 95% of the market and in July 2003 Netscape was shut-down and all remaining engineers were laid-off.

Despite this meteoric rise and fall, the legacy lives on. Here is a brief list of the projects that have spun out of Netscape:

• Javascript
• Secure Software Layer (SSL)
• Mozilla ( + Firefox)
• Flipboard

In a 2015 Quartz article Siino reflects on this period, “it was heartbreaking to see our company go away. We know what we did. We know the revolution we created. That’s something I will never forget.”

Waiting on Blockchain’s Netscape Moment

Looking back, the Netscape case-study has two fundamental takeaways.

First, its IPO created a new paradigm for financing disruptive ideas/projects.

Second, it took existing infrastructure and made it accessible to the masses, thus leading to adoption and scale.

These questions are not unlike the ones facing the blockchain ecosystem. How do we finance our projects (i.e., what are the future of token sales?) and how do we cross the chasm?

Financing

There has already been much written on this. I believe the shift to ICOs and fundraising via tokens will be one of the most disruptive of our lifetime.

With that said, we’re living in an era of great regulatory uncertainty.

More on this later.

Crossing the Chasm: Design + UX + Accessibility

Blockchain is at the edge of the chasm.

We’ve seen early adopters engage via Bitcoin, and, perhaps more appropriately, through apps like Coinbase. Yet most blockchain and crypto projects are entirely too hard to use.

With roughly 13,000 daily active users across 1,983 dApps, the data reflects this.

“Crypto is still to difficult for the average person to use.”

We’re a movement desperately in need of interfaces that are so seamless, users don’t even know they’re using blockchain.

Netscape dominated because it gave consumers an easy-to-use access point for the infrastructure of the internet. Suddenly, the internet wasn’t a nebulous concept but something that the average consumer could see and interact with. My mother doesn’t know a thing about HTML, but she can use the web.

This same paradigm shift must happen for the blockchain ecosystem.

As mentioned above, Coinbase was one of the first projects to nail this. Sure, it is a centralized application. But it made buying and selling Bitcoin accessible to the average consumer.

From 2015 to 2017, the number of bitcoin wallets increased from roughly 3 million to around 25 million (not all of them are currently active). Simultaneously, Coinbase grew from 2M users to roughly 13.3M.

Today, the company is valued at $8 Billion.

Why? Because it made cryptocurrencies accessible to the average person. It feels exactly like opening up an online bank account or funding your TD Ameritrade account.

With that said, Coinbase alone will (obviously) not be enough.

For blockchain to disrupt legacy models, it must match, or out-match, existing user experiences and value propositions.

In the next 5 years, I believe the most successful blockchain and crypto projects will be the ones that put the technology under the hood while giving users the same experience they’ve come to expect.

Conclusion

We’re at the beginning… at the beginning of what may be one of the biggest shifts of our lifetime.

By looking at where we’ve come from, we can focus on where we’re going.

Please feel free to share your thoughts, feelings, and questions in the comments below.