The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen’s Five Big Ideas
In a series called Wired Icons, Wired Magazine is interviewing their biggest heroes. First on the list was Marc Andreessen. In this great article, Wired editor in chief, Chris Anderson outlines Andreessen’s amazing career according to his five major insights. Below are some highlighted quotes from Andreessen.
1992: Everyone Will Have the Web
“At the time, there were four presumptions made against dialup Internet access, and after Mosaic took off I could see that they were all wrong. The first presumption was that dialup flat-out wouldn’t work.”
“The second presumption was that it was too expensive—and that it would always stay as expensive as it was. The third presumption was that people wouldn’t be smart enough to figure out how to get it working at home. But the most interesting presumption was the fourth one: that consumers wouldn’t want it, that they wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
Andreessen’s insight was “essentially knocking through all four of those assumptions.”
1995: The Browser Will Be the Operating System
“As if the technology wanted it to happen.”
Bob Metcalfe’s famous line, “retweeted” often by Andreessen,
Netscape would render Windows “a poorly debugged set of device drivers.”
“Technology is like water; it wants to find its level.”
“If you have infinite network bandwidth, if you have an infinitely fast network, then this is what the technology wants. But we’re not yet in a world of infinite speed, so that’s why we have mobile apps and PC and Mac software on laptops and phones.”
On Javascript,
“The basic idea, which remains in force today, is that you do some computation on the device, but you want the server application to be in control of that. And the whole process is completely invisible to the user.”
“The application model of the future is the web application model. The apps will live on the web. Mobile apps on platforms like iOS and Android are a temporary step along the way toward the full mobile web.”
1999: Web Businesses Will Live in the Cloud
Cloud services: “the software power grid.”
“We were the first cloud provider in the modern sense of the term. Our pitch was, you should be able to buy all this software by the drink, instead of having to shell out for the bottle up front.”
“There have also been two huge developments in server technology. The first is commoditization: We were running on expensive Sun servers, but now you can buy Linux servers at a fraction of the cost. The second is virtualization, which makes managing the servers and apportioning services to clients far easier than was possible back in 1999. And that’s why Amazon’s cloud service has been so magical.”
2004: Everything Will Be Social
“In the 1990s, lots of people talked about Moore’s law, which predicts that processing speed will increase exponentially, and Metcalfe’s law, which holds that a network gets exponentially more valuable as nodes are added. But I was also fascinated with Reed’s law. That’s a mathematical property about the forming of groups—for any group of size n, the number of subgroups that can be assembled is 2n.”
“So the bigger the network gets, the more subnetworks that will want to organize themselves—a richer and more varied set of social groups.”
“In retrospect, it seems like social is another dimension of the Internet that was there from the beginning—as if the technology wanted it to happen.”
“I often wonder if we should have built social into the browser from the start.”
“It was really a generational shift—a group of young entrepreneurs, including Andrew Mason and Mark Zuckerberg, who weren’t burned by the dotcom boom and bust. I came to Ning with all these psychic scars. They just looked at the Internet and said, “This stuff is really cool, and we want to build something new.”
2009: Software Will Eat the World
“Software is eating the world. The Internet has now spread to the size and scope where it has become economically viable to build huge companies in single domains, where their basic, world-changing innovation is entirely in the code.”
“The next stops, I believe, are education, financial services, health care, and then ultimately government—the huge swaths of the economy that historically have not been addressable by technology, that haven’t been amenable to the entrance of Silicon Valley-style software companies. But increasingly I think they’re going to be.”
Wired editor, Chris Anderson asks,
“I’m wondering whether there is an economic path by which dematerialization leads to demonetization—where the efficiency of the software sucks economic value out of the whole system.”
“When Milton Friedman was asked about this kind of thing, he said: Human wants and needs are infinite, and so there will always be new industries, there will always be new professions. This is the great sweep of economic history. When the vast majority of the workforce was in agriculture, it was impossible to imagine what all those people would do if they didn’t have agricultural jobs. Then a hundred years later the vast majority of the workforce was in industrial jobs, and we were similarly blind: It was impossible to imagine what workers would do without those jobs. Now the majority are in information jobs. If the computers get smart enough, then what? I’ll tell you: The then what is whatever we invent next.”
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