Code Rush

I talk to lots of people who come here looking for the Silicon Valley experience They arrive with one suit case in hand when they head south on the 101. Hoping to see it this place they've heard about and its freeways, and its office parks and its strip malls, and it looks like every place they've ever been end up wondering where are they come, why did they come here, what was that brought them Code itself is the underlying thing that makes computers work Why is it important to the world, it's because it's the blood of the organism, that's our culture now, it makes everything go Technology has become a God of our society now I mean I think that its--people stand in awe of it and stand in awe of the people that make it There's a sense that software is a kind of new frontier it's you know it's the old gold rush metaphor the California gold rush all over again It's the kind of Hollywood of the Twenties. This very small set of people is really defining how our world's gonna be like I mean you know the computer becoming ubiquitous and the way we interact with the world more and more mediated through the computer is this very small group of people defining what that world's gonna be like. Netscape! everywhere! team! fight! Less than three years ago a small team of engineers at Netscape Communications created software that made surfing the Internet easy and in the process change the face of computing On this day however, the company is in big trouble driven to the ground by its rival and software colossus Microsoft Only a radical strategy will help save it. "Let's hear a loud Mozilla!" Mozilla! Mozilla! Mozilla! Netscape is giving away its source code to programmers outside the company The source code is the secret formula for browsing the web The code is named Mozilla and if widely adapted it will make Netscape's code the Internet standard drawing users to its other products and restoring the company's sagging fortunes. Our story focuses on team of engineers who will come together in this building Over the course of the next year they will turn their lives inside-out to create Mozilla and battle a giant competitor to save their company and shape the future of computing. Right now we have a problem with the work looks like it can't possibly be done for the date we announced so were just trying to drill down on how doomed we are and sometimes the only way to do that is to get everybody in the room and stare each other in the eyes. We said were giving you Netscape Communicator on 3/31 so if were not giving them Netscape Communicator on 3/31 we need a way to address that. The goal is to get Mozilla to developpers by March 31th a few shorts weeks from now it is one of the most ambitious schedules in the company history. - It's a joke - I think we have been very exclusive Michael Toy one of Netscape's first employees heads the team that will prepare Mozilla for public release. We're probably doomed, we're probably gonna fail Microsoft is probably gonna squish us like bug anyway but just cause were doomed doesn't mean you know we cant get up in the morning and do work All rise the honorable Michael Toy presiding. I'm pretty flip with my kids about what I do. What do you do at work dad? Oh I don't know I sit in meetings and feel depressed and I read e-mail. Oh oh you got me! But they think my office is the greatest place in the world though It's like "Oh were going to your office?" "Oh yeah yippie I love going to your office!" They play with the guns and there is free soda and there is the giant balls basically I work at Disneyland as far as they're concerned. I talk about marathon versus sprint. The hard part is to run with significant intensity the all way knowing that if you ever start walking you're not going to make it and just keep the end in sight and know that there's this urgency. Jim Roskind an expert on software security is brought in to enforce rigorous standards of engineering precision. Imagine if you had a project where you felt doom was imminent all the different players wondering are they pushed beyond their level can they think of way of running faster, can anyone help them? So there's lot of tension and anxiety over making the schedule. Jamie Zawinski, free source code evangelist will enlist outside developers to Netscape's cause. The free source thing is trying to change the rules, right. There are people who have the free software religion, the one thing they have in common is they're all hackers they all like writing code so you hoping to tap in to all of those smart people and get something from them, you know, so that everyone benefits. I'm talking about two millions, two and half millions lines of code and everyone of them has to be gone over carefully and in some cases twice. With hundreds of engineers converging on Mozilla, with new code to enable its release, Tara Hernandez makes sure that their changes do not crash Mozilla and brings everyones work to a halt. This is how we keep track of all the changes that are going in. Green is good. Lot of changes going on right here, and wham, the build all died. Ok, alright, bye. We're doomed. Some of the worst crashes are reserved for Scott Collins a veteran code writer who stands by for late night troubleshooting. I've been here for about I don't know, 60 hours or so. Writing software is different from selling real estate. Selling real estate you sell the people the people sleep at night. When they go to sleep you have to stop selling real estate Computers never sleep. You can see my cube is decked out a little bit better than all the people's. I have a nice couch little mattress under there I can sleep in artwork from my children I have control the light switches. This is what I'd like to get if my wife truly love me she'd let me have one. Life is good. Ok Bug count. Alright, there are a ton of bugs on here that people just aren't doing anything about. To give away its code Netscape engineers must make thousands of bug fixes Often minute changes that will allow the code to be used by outside developpers. Jeff Weinstein has, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. One bug hidden in the mass of code can stop everyone else's work and can threaten the ship date. I need someone to page Jeff Weinstein and get him to call 2024. Even a team of twenty people building a car it's easy to step back fourty feet and look and go "Hold it, that guy has not putting on the wheel" You have fourty programmers working they all come to you with code, a gigantic morass of little details piled up on a disc usually can even see the pieces whether they're doing it correctly You have to assemble it into a whole and then see if the whole works and then you're not even sure of who gave you the bad bits. That would be bad. Let's go downstairs, come on! You're talking about a recipe. Who gave you the bad flour. Someone went out to grind flour, and they had to all be exactly the right size chunks of flour. Someone else made chocolate chips, they all had to be exactly the right size chunks. You can't figure it out until you put it all together you hand it out, and people go. "I don't like the way this tastes" And now you have to wonder, with all these details coming together which was the problem who's causing the problem, how can you fix it? You've got to ship on a certain time. And now you have all this people, you have the clock ticking and it gets pretty intense. Since Netscape began the amount of code making up Mozilla has increased by a factor of 30. The job of programming and debugging it rests upon a precarious balance of science and art. They talk about what they do as if it was a kind of alchemy, a kind of wizardry. It does remind me of athletics in that way. You know why is someone a good baseball hitter? Often the hitters themselves can't really explain it. And often the best software people cannot themselves understand why they're so good at it. But I think make a great programmer is being raised techie. My particular team at Netscape, I think we all grew up techie We all grew up with computers around us somewhere, so that we were exposed to them before we became adults, if any of us are really adults Jim is the most grownup of us. A lot of my childhood from roughly age 6 to age 17 was around here. Life was just a nightmare, this is a very, very scary place the two school wasn't too bad. Ah, but it meant it you'd get to work on puzzles and problems. All of the puzzling is math, and that puzzling is the exact same feeling the exact same problem that you go through when you're programming. When I was young it'd be building with erector sets and Lego now the structures that you build are in software. My mom is a first class geek too. And so I have a unique experience of being able to talk shop with my mom, cuz' she's a director of really important stuff at Sun. At Netscape one of the code words for is the average person who is going to be able to use this software is, "Well can my mom use it?" Yeah, my mom can use it. My mom can write optimizing compilers. By the time I was 12 years old I was making 50 bucks an hour programming computers. People say what should I be should I grow up to be a... I say computer programmer. The thing about that makes it a youth culture is one's capacity to throw one's entire life on the line with these firms Entire life commitment meaning 24-7-365 work commitment. It's throwing yourself into a thing where you don't know if that job is going to be around soon. There's no stability in here. So the very kind of weird irony is that very people who are inventing the future can't see their own future. This is a monk-life existence there are very few women in these societies. These are male societies, they are secret societies, they function very much like the Masons or some street gang. Evil! Evil! Evil! Evil man! Why am I an evil man? Did you or did you not hear a man saying if you have a source leaving one bug, you will be in here at 1:30. I thought it was 2:30 Now you're evil and stupid. (laughs) You now that, I'm actually just in a different time zone. I thought stupidity was an excuse though. A lot of people at Netscape don't get out much because they're at work all the time but most of people's social interaction I would expect is revolves around work just because so many people spend so much of their time at work. Hi Chris, it's Tara um, how much do you love me? Good. What do you know about way the threading stuff that falls into Javascript stuff and Java makes it feed? All we have left to hold on to, really is the work place, I mean it is the modern village. People get to know your history they shrug at your bad jokes. There's a kind of familiarity that and continuity that we don't have elsewhere. Paul we're going go out in a while and get something to eat and do stupid things. You're interested? Sure. Sure. Right. Ok, the purpose of this meeting is not to beat up people the purpose of this meeting is to make sure that as a company we are incredibly focused on getting the bug count to 0 we've been moderately focused up until now we need to be deadly focused from here on in. Ok Jeff Weinstein is he in this room? He's not in this room. Did not check-in this weekend, true or false? He did not check-in this weekend He did not answer his mail and he hasn't answered his phone yet either. His locator shows he's with the rest of the colonists (laughs) The old saying is that trying to manage programmers is like trying to herd cats. You know you want them to be cats if you like cats, I mean 'cause you want what's unique about that creature But they really don't all like to go in the same direction. In less than four years Netscape has grown from a handful of people to over 200 and sometimes, locating a programmer become yet another obstacle for the browser team to overcome. I'd say he's not in there. That would be my guess, straight out. He's not there. When's the last time he was in here? This afternoon. Ok Tara and I are ready to take a hit out on him. and well if ya see him when he comes back tell him to panic and run around and we're like doomed on Mac right now with this thing. Doomed! The person working on Mac is like waiting for data right? You should go around to every person in the company saying, "Doomed!" Netscape predicament has much to do with this man Bill Gates, whose company, Microsoft has made him the richest, and arguably the most powerful man in the world. Allright if we can have order we'd like to begin. Viewing Netscape's browser as a potential threat to his computing empire Gates has moved swiftly, making his own browser free and Netscape claims, also engaging an unfair business practices to take away its customers. But we need to explore today whether you and your company have crossed the line or on the other hand whether this is just the carping of disgruntled rivals. Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale argues his company's case before the Senate. And certainly nobody here on this panel is a greater admirer of Mr. Gates or his company than I am. But we do ask that Microsoft be held accountable for some of their actions. Actions that intimidate PC OEM manufacturers to use their products and exclusionary practises that prevent them from using my products. Not all companies succeed. Some fail to embrace change. This is the way technology in the free market works. The software industry's success has not been driven by government regulation but by freedom and the basic human desire to learn, to innovate and to excel. Meanwhile thousand of miles away Netscape programmers continue working around the clock in a race to meet Mozilla's release date. These guys they tend to work very consistently, so they'll just keep working until it's done and they won't stop. They don't need food, they don't need sleep, they don't need anything OK, so they take pay, but... A while ago some people from Harvard came and said "Well how do you develop software, we're writing a book" and I and I talked about all the things I thought were really important and they were just it felt to me like they were shaking their heads going, Oh, gee, he doesn't know about Principle 7 and oh, he doesn't know about Principle 22 and in some ways they're right... I really haven't got a clue. Right I really like to err on the side of every day we wake up in the morning and say based on what I know today what's the best way to get to where we all want to go? I personally or me and you three of us do no have time to read all two millions of source code to see that, there are no remaining problems. We're going over here zeroing in on Jeff Weinstein. With March 31st only days away the team can't proceed until Jeff Weinstein an expert on some of Netscapes most arcane code finds time to complete the bug fixes on his list. How are you doing? OK Alright well you are officially the most doomed individual in the company sir this one I can close, same with this one yeah bunch of these Um hopefully I'll get most of it done tonight His goal he was just going to stay all night and he was going to get it all done. The good news is actually I think by about I'm not sure if it was 9 or 11 o'clock at night he actually was completely done. Yeah! Reaching a critical milestone is cause for celebration. And one bug left and it's a really really hard one Don't make me kill you, close 4330. I will close 4330. Bug count is small there are some bugs that are not currently closed but most of them are like piddly little annoying things that Some of its stuck! All praise the uh the mighty ones that created tremendous pile of people working really hard this week to do the impossible. There is this magic phrase that Michael Toy invented which is "Zarro Boogs", hum which is it's not quite perfect but it's perfect enough as zero bugs / "zarro boogs". Do you have a spare monitor upstairs? Yes I do have a spare monitor. This is the first big test Will an outsider actually be able to make Mozilla work? If not Netscape stands a good chance of missing its March 31st deadline I thought it's gonna be huge thing, I thought it's gonna be like a hundred, two hundred people here like all and rows like with soviet style. We are nowhere near that organized Looks like it's all here, here we go! Wow! All good, it's pretty simple how stuff is built. It's just there's set of scripts that are set up to say exactly what to compile and then they all get globbed together into Mozilla hopefully. - Here it is - Yeah If you get it to work, then it means anybody can get it to work. That's true. (WILD CHEERING clapping laughter) - And look It has an about face! - ...Look it's so cute... - Oh, that was pretty - Yeah it's... - No, I don't think it's working. - Well go to the.. - Well - Oh... - Big crash... - Hell shot the foot... It's actually going really well. I didn't think we'd actually get somebody to build this quickly. We had to do one small adjustment and it worked! With the source almost ready to ship, Netscape must explain the significance of Mozilla to the press. Basically what we wanna do is we wanna give them a little bit of the history and then we wanna go into the what's actually going to happen tomorrow. The other important take away then too from this is that this is a really exciting cool thing. - Good afternoon, Forrester - Hi Stan Dolberg and uh Eric Brown please. - One second. - You've reached voicemail for Stan Dolberg -- I'll transfer you now - Good afternoon, Forrester. - Hi this is Maggie Young. I'm calling from Netscape and I have scheduled conference call with Stan Dolberg and Eric Brown and I just got Stan's voicemail. Netscape hopes the press will greet Mozilla with the same enthusiasm it had for the company in its early days. At eleven AM this morning, Netscape's stock went public and Wall Street went bonkers. Initially offer had a price of 38 $ a share, Netscape shut up to 72 within minutes... The stock is bid up at extraordinary levels in the first couple of really days and weeks of its introduction. It is the biggest initial public offering in basically the Wall Street history. - Good afternoon, Forrester - Hi this is Josh Walker. Today less than three years after its record breaking IPO however, Netscape's story generates a different response. - Hi there - Yup - As you now tomorrow is March 31st - So that means hum, source code will be made available to the developer community. And we thought we would just catch you up to speed and walk you through that and see if you had some questions. - Either I'm braindead or it takes lot of effort to communicate and so I'm concerned that while you all know what it means, I'm not confident that it's coming across to the press. - Right, I think those are good points. By opening up the source code, we basically extend our developer community from those folks that are inside of Netscape to hundreds and thousands of developers outside of Netscape so it's no longer Netscape versus Microsoft. It's Netscape and all of the Netscape, you know, virtual community. - I think there is a belief that Netscape doesn't have a position to continue to compete with Microsoft in the browser front and that in essence you've given up on the browser position. This was a lot more smooth than I had originally anticipated. Really. I'm still waiting for the major bump in the road that's gonna happen some time between now and tomorrow afternoon. In software development there is always a bump in the road. We just want to hear the Apple story They just can't quite get themselves comfortable with the patent grant or with whatever we tried to do to fix it for them. So the last thing back out of their lawyer was "gee, oh I don't know that we get enough protection." Mozilla has a small piece of code from Apple that has not been cleared for public license. - Ok. - We have to escalate. - Hi this is Mark Andreeson, I called a few minutes ago, and left message we're trying to get - the problem is I can't get phone there's no one at the Apple switchboard so I'm having a hard time getting phone numbers for people. Awesome. Hold on, 6 2 0. In order to ship Mozilla the next morning, Scott Collins is called in to replace Apple's code with his own invention. And theoretically we believe this is possible. It's my last bug. When I complete this bug, I will be allowed to rest. So I stayed up until about 5:40, this morning writing this replacement class. It made my life a living hell. I got it basically running, it's all running, it's all really good, and thank heavens we got permission from Apple to ship the regular source. It's my understanding that Jamie is gonna be the person that's gonna be pushing the bits up to the website at around 10:00, is that correct? OK. And we're gonna be staging some different photo opportunities for the press at that time, there will be television cameras you know news crews - Couldn't we just like hire actors to do this for us? - ...just tell them they get to be on TV come on.. - We're not gonna mandate it.. - You're on TV right now. - We've been on TV for two months. - I don't think anyone is gonna come. One way to learn to run a marathon is put a person out 26 miles into the desert, and say, you know, there's this bomb on your back that's gonna go off in a certain length of time if you don't get into the town. Well, that'll motivate you to get in but there is a certain chance that you'll be blown up. - You know what time it is? - Yeah it's five to ten. - Aah! Going to be late. Hurry up! Welcome everybody to the conference call. Thanks for joining us this morning. Today Netscape announced that the first developer release of its Communicator 5.0 source code is available for download from the Mozilla dot org website. - You know where Tara is? - Second floor? - It's first floor, way on the other side. And then today on the end of March, as we announced, we are pushing the code out to the Web as they say, and we are delighted to be part of it and we're very excited to see what happens. The good news is the marathoner is now coming into town with that bomb on his back and it looks like he's gonna make it. - This is the moment of truth! They don't have theoretical framework to write software, they're just writing it. It's just like hitting the baseball. If their code gets a home run, nobody's asking questions. Well, this doesn't make sense, or why do you that, why does it work. Nobody cares why it works. - Wait this is bad. - What's that? - Well it's not connecting to... - The machine that controls the FTP push is, like, not answering. - Is it loaded? - It's "blast" not "blash". - Oh - Yeah maybe they're... - Mac's there. UNIX is there. Windows is there. - We're done! - It's on! - Yeah! - Since Jamie is here, I am told that means that we have now pushed the source out on the Net. Is that correct? - Actually, we decided not to. We thought it was a stupid idea. - That's our story and were sticking to it. For a moment, everyone at Netscape takes a breather. - I think it's gonna work out. In the first hour of its release, the source code is downloaded thousands of times but the number of downloads is no guarantee that Netscape will receive enough valuable contributions to help the company to reverse its slide. He's known as Pavlov to me. He's Pavlov at Pavlov.net, on IRC he's Pavlov or Pav or um, Pav Sleeping, or Pav Tired Up Too Late. And um without him I think we'd be months behind. Netscape's notoriety draws code writers from around the world willing to work on Mozilla without pay. One such contributor comes from rural Georgia. I've been amazed over the last two or three years, when especially his mother would come tell me "Well, so and so called" from maybe New York and they were coming to Atlanta and they wanted to talk to Stuart or see him, and they were gonna go down and have lunch. "Well", I'd say "Who is this person from New York?" And the all of a sudden "Well, he's been working with Stuart on some programming issues for a year or so and he wanted to come down and meet. "Well, did you tell him you're only sixteen?" I had no idea. Um, and that's great, that's a wonderful thing because he's contributing. It doesn't matter that he's young. The place we call the cave. We just shut the door and this is where he does whatever he does. It is flabbergasting to think that your child has done something for this worldwide company instead of his homework. I went and looked back at the older code and I was really frightened by how incredibly messy and just awful the code looked. It would have taken you know years to try and figure out what it was doing. So we basically did it from scratch. Pretty much I'm providing the code that makes the browser show everything faster and more efficiently than it used to. His keyboarding is almost just like talking. It's just um, an expression. He can express himself that way and it's just totally unconscious, almost. Just a part of how he communicates. In the past, free code contributions helped build the Internet. How commercial enterprise would benefit from free code remains a big question. Well, it's certainly my hope that the enormous amount of new people that no one company could afford to have working on any product, now contributing to the Netscape Navigator Communicator will make a significant difference in the improvement of the product. How that works against any competitor, remains to be seen. -Good morning -Good morning, Thank you. David Readerman an analyst for San Francisco Investment Bank, closely monitors Netscape's radical plan for investors eager to participate in the Internet stock boom. The market is really kind of a voting machine, it's voting yes I believe that vision statement. Yes I believe that's gonna result in products sales. Yes that's going to drive earnings up, and you know stocks should traded accordingly. The financial benefits to Netscape of giving away its source code are hard to measure. I understand why Netscape's trying to do it. They still have to show me that behind the vision and the slideware, there's a real sustainable business model that can deliver earnings hum, and so I'm in show-me mode for Netscape. Now, my job will be three times as hard as it was yesterday and it was already ten times harder than it needed to be. Right? Did I just work really hard to ship the company jewels out of the building and it's just gonna end in us dying and rolling in poison and misery. The day after this stuff goes out, you really don't get to let up. There is then the sort of day in day out, go to work turn on the computer, code, code code. - Thanks Tara. - Tara? - Yeah what's your doctor say Tara? - Uh, my doctor says interestingly enough that I work too much and uh, that if I went to work today after my appointment he would personally kill me. I have an agreement with myself that by the time I'm 35, I'm either going to be high school teacher or bartender, but something, anything other than a in a position in the hightech industry, otherwise I'll probably die by the time I'm 40. Uh, now that I'm an old guy I've kind of been round the block couple times and you can go from realizing, "This just never stops, does it?" And that being really depressing because you feel like it "I'm on, I'm on". I said I was never going to be on the treadmill and here I am. I'm on the treadmill. I'm going to be running like this forever. Because they're good at software, they need to keep pace. And as a result, keeping pace means to shut a lot of other things out. They just don't have time to read, time to hear about the world. They don't have much time for their families. Um, but when you're in situation where you really have a lot of work to do and no time to do it, you know, you pick what you want. Some people pick wanting to have a family. Some people pick wanting to get some software done. Christopher was born right after I started at Netscape, and I basically missed the first two years of his life because of the intensity. I'd work 'til about 7 or 8 o'clock, come home, eat dinner, put the kids to bed, and then go back to work, or work from home, until 2 or 3 in the morning, and was like the Dad zombie. He would call and say, I'm on my way home and then it would be 2 or 3 hours and you know, the romantic dinner candles had burned down and I was thinking he was dead by the side of the road so, you know if 24 hours goes by and I don't hear from him, that I pretty much know where to find him. I live in Michigan. And I commute. So it's quite a long commute, I don't make it every day. I only make it about every two weeks or so. But um, It is quite a time change. Here it's something like 12:01 in the morning, and there it's 1954. The motivation from moving back here is I wanted to get into a community, put roots down, and you know, feel settled. And I...Life is just different out there, it really is. I mean here people like worked car factory or whatever... thirty years and out. We spent, like, 45 minutes talking about all his like, his whole story, from job, to job, to job, to job. I thought it was pretty cool. He had like ten or something, jobs. He seemed to do it a lot during particularly peak stressful times, like, you know, baby due in two months, I'm changing jobs now, dear. I like when everything is changing. That makes it's exciting. That's why I do it. It's something to be in the storm, right in the middle of it and seeing everything new happening and putting it all together. It's really exciting. It's almost addictive. I wouldn't want to leave it, that's for sure. At times, it's a clear sacrifice of elements of your personal life. I have to work very hard but I have the chance of being rewarded for my efforts. This disadvantage, my life's moving on. I don't have any children yet, you realize there's a certain amount of my life that I'm sacrificing I'm going to look back and a portion of this life is gone. In the U.S., we have at least several million people directly making a living from software. And it's the fastest growing group of people in the economy. And it's certainly in aggregate, the highest paying field of its size. I mean yeah, you've got baseball, you've got Hollywood. But you know when you really think of a group that has millions of people in it, these are the highest wages anybody has ever seen in the United States. The opportunity to win big for code writers is very real. In fact, that if you will jackpot opportunity is reflected here on a Wall Street trading desk. And I find that a lot of the engineers and managers from Silicon Valley are very attuned to what goes on on these trading floors daily. By one account, 64 millionaires are created daily in Sillicon Valley where any technology worker can striking rich over night. You join a company and they give you some stock options which basically says, rather than just giving you stock, they give the right to buy the stock in the future at the current price. You might get stock in the order of maybe a year's salary or two years salary typically, worth of options. In some of these real booming companies out there on the Internet, the potential for becoming a millionaire or doing very well, is very, very high. The people who were very, very early, they call them "Mozillionaires". Stock options are a con. Um, it's a carrot and dangle, it's like, oh well, you know if you'll give up your one and only youth, maybe someday you'll make money, right... it's um, I've known so many people who have gambled on start-up lottery and got nothing. You know it's just like lottery ticket, it's a stupid tax. Um, I happened to win that particular lottery. From the day Microsoft announced its aggressive commitment to the Internet, however, Netscape stock has been in steady decline, and throughout most of 1998 Netscape options are essentially worthless. A year and a half ago, half of our revenue came from browser sales. Today none of it does, so well, Any business person out there knows that that's a huge challenge. I mean let me take your number one selling product away from you and you replace that within period of 12 months or so. Not many people want to do that. Even though the company sells other Internet products, the marketplace views Netscape as a browser company in a losing battle with Microsoft. - Greg this is Jim Barksdale with Netscape Communications, how are you? It's clear that Netscape doesn't have enough pieces to threaten Microsoft. I don't think that Netscape long term can survive as an independent company. While Mozilla tries to recapture the early, glory days of the company, integrating code from the outside means more work for everyone on the browser team. - Apparently I must have done it backwards from what you told me, or I don't know what - Ok, then this is bad. - We want to take the old free tree and use it as subsection, and we want to build this interesting tree around this. - No that's not want we want to do NS Private at the top, right? - A project file for this or project file for that, it can't be a project file for both. We don't have a plan for doing both. So right now I have some files that have to come from here for Java in a single directory, and some files that have to come from here in the same directory, the same directory. Tell me how I do that? That's the problem. The browser division which costs the company almost 30 million dollars a year to operate and contributes few revenues to the company is reorganized in the fall for the second time in less than a year. Do we have all the answers: No. We're going to try and learn what we can from seeing the people who've done this well... When I joined a start-up, I knew that 19 out of 20 fail. When an employee comes to work at Netscape today, he doesn't have the perception that there's a 19 out of 20 chance that this job is not gonna be in place 1 to 5 years from now. If you live here, it is the ubiquitous conversation "Do you believe that Microsoft has used either a) illegal or just unfair methods to take market share from Netscape?" And if the heart and soul of this industry is opportunity, is egalitarianism, Microsoft having achieved its market share on anything other than the backs of its code really riles every body up. Justice department has charged Microsoft with engaging an anti-competitive and exclusionary practises designed to maintain its monopoly in personal computer operating systems and attempting to extend that monopoly to Internet browser software. Regardless of its case against Microsoft, Netscape has become a victim of its increasing size and the growing complexities of its code, the company struggles to maintain the vitality it enjoyed as a start-up. When a company gets to be above a certain size, it's just a process, it's a mechanism for making money. And innovation is like one possible way of doing that, but it's a risky way. So companies, big companies don't do that. Um, Microsoft actually doesn't do very much, they buy companies. They wait until someone has done something interesting and then they acquire them, and then they milk it for all it's worth. I don't mean to pick on Microsoft because lots of companies do that, it's just the normal way of doing business. We're on out way to the Flint Center now. We're going to have an all-hands meeting. Jim Barksdale has moved up the all hands meeting by roughly about a week. We just announce quarterly results and now this major change in direction. Well, in case you haven't read the newspaper, we have, as of 1:30 this morning, concluded negotiations and agreed to sell our company to AOL of Dulles, Virginia. I can't imagine that day when they announced the merger, that they weren't like "Oh, I don't believe this". You know, sort of a nightmare scenario. Although, you know, the worst one would have been Microsoft's buying us, I guess, you know. Then they would have, you know you would've seen like his this flow of cars out of Netscape Six months ago they were insulting AOL's technology, you know, it was the service for idiots. "Congratulations skippy, you've got mail!" Netscape is not unusual in the way they felt about AOL in Silicon Valley. I mean, it's very clear that nobody had any respect for the company. One of them at Netscape called Steve Case a soap salesman because he used to work at Proctor and Gamble. The soap salesman bought them. The quote that came out of this article was "Netscape: (similar lines of) lived fast, died young, and left a tired corpse". And I don't know they agree with that. I don't think Netscape's done yet. They bought us because they like us, they like what we do, and they don't want to disturb that formula; so their plan is to not damage us in any way. There had been alot of, uh, a lot of speculation out on the net, you know, in the free software community, like oh well this is it, you know, it's all over now "AOL's just gonna screw everything up". So I wrote this thing that I put on the Mozilla.org site that just laid out the worst case scenario, like, well okay, even if everything goes wrong it's still not as bad as you're saying it is. Because the nature of what Netscape did meant that the code belongs to the community now. Few days later I got email from Steve Case, saying, um, we think that you're doing is great thing and it's part of the reason we bought the company we plan to keep it going that way, so um, as far as Mozilla.org and Netscape and AOL's contribution to the open-source movement goes, he says, it's gonna continue... The merger with AOL creates a windfall for shareholders that will give Netscape employees the chance to cash out and move on, causing speculation in the national media about AOL's ability to retain Netscape's key people. And already I hear, you know, that AOL people come at Netscape and say, yeah this is the AOL way. It's not gonna work at Netscape. It's gonna be the Netscape way with help from AOL! I suspect some of them will leave. You know, they don't want to be part of AOL. Some people just like the start-up mentality. And those that want to be part of a juggernaut are going to stay and be part of the juggernaut. I've been at Netscape for 3 and a half years and it feels like forever. And AOL's focus and Netscape's growing focus has been marketing and advertising, all that stuff, and that's not nearly as interesting to someone who's sort of a techno-fetishist. I'm switching jobs and selling my house, I'm moving, switching towns... That's life for start-up land. I'm still young and stupid as I like to put it, so I can get away with that stuff like that. Year and a half ago, so Tara comes to me she says "I want to be a manager so bad, that I can taste it". So we finally said alright, you get to be a manager. And like within a week she said "Why did you ever let me do this?" And Tara has turned out to be like one of Netscape's greatest managers. So here is to Tara, release team manager. Tara leaves Netscape for an e-commerce start-up, missing out on a big jump in the value of her stock options in hopes for a bigger pay out at her new company. Regardless of how AOL runs the Netscape business, it's not Netscape anymore - that part's over. And you know, that's really sad I wish Netscape could have gone it on their own. Frustrated by what he perceives as a lack of commitment to open-source development, Jamie quits Netscape one year to the day he helped to give away Mozilla. The movie Hackers I think is just a great movie. I wish our lives were like that, I wish we were roller skating around in spandex and fighting bad guys, but you know it's not it's sitting in a room and typing all day. This is what I was trying to escape, this life. I knew I did not want to live here. I've been out here now about four of five years. This is a nice place. This is escape from the jungle. Jim Roskind is promoted to Netscape's highest engineering rank. Last night I was here at four in the morning, and this isn't even in the middle of a critical push. But it's almost like an addiction, an adrenaline rush, a going for perfection, a pushing. And then as you see the results, you get the feedback to push harder. You know I really shouldn't comment on this since I'm just as foolish as everyone else is but I'll just go ahead and do it while admitting that I'm foolish, there's just a tremendous quest for material wealth here. It's like the goldrush all over again. And this is gonna be the playhouse. And then this will be like a front porch I think a little flowers and stuff. So it will be like a cute little house. I went to Netscape because its main purpose was to generate cash, based on this Internet thing. It's like what we're gonna do, we're gonna get rich. It just took a heavy toll on our marriage, and, if it wasn't for God's grace, we wouldn't have made it. "Why would I use god gives" Micheal burned out. Micheal, came to a place, in his own life where he said the cost is too great, I'm not gonna do it anymore. If people are - would look at this and say oh hey this is a cool thing, I'm gonna start a start-up and get rich quick I would just have to say you need to count the costs because you can't ever retrieve the time that's lost. Michael Toy Netscape employee number 6 achieved his goal of financial independance and retired from Netscape shortly after Mozilla's release. In the Valley, if you've stayed someplace longer than about three years people wonder what's going on? Why can't you get another job, what's wrong with you? If you're a programmer, you pretty much change jobs about every two years or so. It's like ants, worker ants. They send out a group out to do something. As that group approaches the task that they're gonna do some ants leave, more ants come on By the time it gets to the target it could be a totally different set of ants I think as we distribute the set of work that we're doing and more and more, in the Information Age it'll be more like that. Scott Collins continues to commute to Netscape from Michigan. There's lot of pressure right now to complete our product on time. Um, sort of wade in with the ridiculous acrobatics the stock is doing. We were a 20$ company and as of this moment our stock is at 172$. So it's hard to be depressed about the amount of work you have to do when every other cube holds a millionnaire. When the deal with AOL closes in the Spring of 1999 the value of Netscape's stock more than doubled since the merger's announcement. Netscape married right. They hitched their fortunes to AOL when the transaction was announced, the implied valuation was about 4.2 billion when transaction was completed, the transaction was valued at 10 billion. So in effect about 5.5 or 6 billion dollars of net worth was created so I think it was the very clever deal-making of Netscape management that kept them in the game much longer and Netscape's shareholders benefited quite considerably. Mo- -zill- -la lives! While many executives sold their stock during Netscape's final year Barksdale bought more and after the merger he swapped his shares for more than half a billion dollars of AOL stock. Another young man comes west to seek his fortune on technology's new frontier. I'm a little bit nervous going into this interview, cause I'm not entirely sure what to expect. It's a long way away Three thousand miles is a long way for your child to be But this is a place where there's a lot going on that he's very interested in and I think has some talents in this area. And I really think that this may be kind of home for him as far as being able to work with people that he can actually talk to. - Pavlov! - What I want to know is, what you want to do I mean, what your goals are in the next couple of years? - My goal right now is that I want to see the UNIX version faster than the Windows version. Once you pull that off, then, you know, we'll see. But that's my goal. Pavlov is hired by Netscape. He postpones going to college. Taking part in what one investor has called the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet, David Readerman moves to a new investment bank. Here's the data center, a lot of cable, a lot of fiber. These can be sort of, you know, Internet connections they can be our trading lines, our phone lines. You know we're lying the infrastructure to basically build a major merchant bank. Our view is that the Internet changes everything and we're going to finance the companies that want to be the agents of that change. Look at this intersection, we've got a bank here, in two years you know this may not be here, why not bank online? Gap's website is one of the most successful commerce websites on the market. I don't even know why Gap's renovating this store? Why aren't they investing more in their website? I don't know what this intersection may look two years from now. When I started people didn't know what HTML was, what the World Wide Web was, and then all of a sudden the power of the Internet that had been there for years was available to everybody in an easy way, Point & click, the universal language. It's like in Fantasia when Mickey is standing over the book that's open on the mountain, and he's looking in to see what to do and he does something. And he doesn't really know what he does but it makes something happen. And of course this thing gets out of control and keeps going. You don't know why it works, you don't know how it works, you just push a button and it works. We're at the beginning of an industry and who knows where that industry's gonna go? This could all turn into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear. And there's a lot of precedent for that. I'm just laying down the tracks and there were these trains zooming by me, and there's no way I'd want to say it's a bad thing to have these trains fly by. I could be a horrible legacy. If it ended up being a legacy of, you know, Netscape and the Internet, that we could all like, do what we're doing only under much more intense pressure and much faster. Everything has to change faster, obviously, you know, look at Netscape. It was born and died. I don't want to use the word "died", they wouldn't like that word. But basically it was born and overtaken within four years. That's pretty fast, I think. They must think it's very fast. Near the end of 1999, the public still awaits Netscape's first open source browser, more than a year after Mozilla was released. The judge and the justice department end a trust trial rules that Microsoft is a monopoly, it stiffles innovation. AOL begins the millenium with a new even larger aquisition, and investors continue buying technology stocks, which trade with increasing volatility. Still as the Internet finds its way into every corner of daily life, so, too will legions of programmers and their code, working fast and late into the night.