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The transformation that has set Microsoft on the road to a Net-based future has also completed Gates' beatification as not just a great hacker but also a world-class CEO. Microsoft's warp-speed reinvention may set the standard for information-age corporate agility. "I don't think you'd be interviewing me on this topic if we were any less nimble," Gates told Time. "You'd be writing our epitaph."
But in the odd world of high technology, a great product, a remarkable corporate transformation and market acceptance could in fact be an epitaph. The Next Big Thing, just a gleam in some undergraduate's eye today, could put your company out of business tomorrow. Andy Grove, the Intel CEO who led his microprocessor company through a series of similarly wrenching changes a decade ago, has distilled the essence of competing in a high-tech world down to a single sentence: "Only the paranoid survive." He's right. Uncertainty is the watchword of the new digital age. That's why Microsoft is throwing everything it's got at Netscape. And that's why, despite that onslaught, Netscape still has a chance.
When absolute superiority is not attainable, you must produce a relative one at the decisive point by making use of what you have. --Clausewitz
In the heady days after Netscape's ballistic IPO last summer--the stock shot from $27 to $71 during its first day of trading--Barksdale preached humility in the company's cramped halls. "I have a rule," he explains. "You can't talk about the stock price internally. We're not going to get focused on paper worth. We're going to keep building products." So the sandy-haired CEO was surprised to discover that his assistant had set up an electronic stock ticker in his office. "I said, 'Did you think I was kidding? Take that away!'" Barksdale recalls, laughing. "I try to lead by example, and here she was flashing the price."
Friends say the story is typical of Barksdale, 52, who brought his lead-from-the-front style and slow Mississippi drawl to Silicon Valley last spring from AT&T, where he was CEO of AT&T Wireless Services. Though less well known than Netscape's co-founders, Jim Clark and boy wonder Marc Andreessen, 25, Barksdale has what is clearly the most difficult, and most essential, job of the three: getting Netscape to live up to its $3.1 billion market value.
That will take some doing. Matching its fiscal reality to Wall Street's hopes will mean completing one of the great Horatio Alger stories in the history of American business. As every self-respecting teenage computer ace knows, Netscape was born in the ratty University of Illinois dorm of Andreessen, then 21, a Midwesterner who liked nothing so much as an afternoon in front of the computer, geeking out. Over a few dozen of those code-filled afternoons in 1993, Andreessen and his youthful collaborators put the finishing touches on the Model T of Web-browsing programs. They called it Mosaic, because it combined all the pieces of the Net--text, audio, images--onto "pages" that could be viewed from anywhere in the world. Mosaic was the first glimpse of a multimedia future that giants such as Microsoft had been predicting but not delivering. And it changed everything. Among the digerati, the question "Where were you when you first saw Mosaic?" is as significant as asking people from an earlier generation where they were when they first heard the Beatles.