(4 of 7)
The sound of the Net revolution quickly made its way to Silicon Valley, where venture capitalist ears are always eagerly listening for the ringing music of a great new idea. Clark, a Valley millionaire who had a similar revelation a decade earlier when he founded Silicon Graphics to build high-end graphics computers, hired Andreessen and set up shop as Mosaic Communications. Six months later, the company shipped its first Navigator browser.
A classic entrepreneur, Clark is good at founding companies but less interested in running them. His fortune derives from vision more than execution. By late 1994, with Netscape growing fast, he knew the time had come to look for help. Clark cast a rich, stock-baited hook into a pool of one: Jim Barksdale bit.
Barksdale is one of a handful of corporate managers who make up the varsity squad of American CEOs. Though less well known than Coca-Cola's Robert Goizuetta and GE's Jack Welch, he radiates the same cocksure attitude, bred from an ability to project a vast strategic vision and master simultaneously each of its components.
And there was something else: Barksdale had already been to war. He was a veteran of Federal Express's victory in the great overnight-delivery battle in the 1980s, and of Craig McCaw's end run around AT&T and the regional Bells in the cellular wars in the early 1990s. He moved to AT&T after the long-distance company bought out McCaw. Barksdale made a fortune on the FedEx and McCaw successes, but both experiences netted him something more valuable: the confidence of a winner. "UPS had more money than God, certainly more money than Microsoft," he says. "When they got into our business, we were scared to death. Well, today FedEx is a $10 billion company."
Barksdale brings that same damn-the-torpedoes sensibility to his fight with Microsoft, where he has embraced a simple strategy: Get out, get known, get in. "We're a little company. We can't afford a big television advertising campaign," he says, pointedly gazing north toward the Colossus of Redmond's $100 million ad budget. Instead Barksdale is betting the farm on Netscape's continued domination of the browser business. "Is it a sure success?" he says. "Hell, no. We work constantly at it. But this idea that somehow or other Microsoft says, 'Thank you, boys, for thinking this up. Now we'll come take it over,' is way premature."
The strategy has its risks: in a business where a six-month delay threatens obsolescence, any slip in Netscape's warp-speed browser-development cycle could prove fatal. So Barksdale's first priority is making sure Netscape's programmers, who still report to Andreessen, have everything they need to stay on top. This means rooms of their own, all the caffeine they can absorb and hours of fatherly advice about working better, not more.
Barksdale knows that long-term success lies in turning Navigator into a viable alternative to Windows. Andreessen, Barksdale and Clark (a triumvirate insiders refer to as "Marc, Bark and Clark") envision a future Netscape product that will assume many of the computer's operating-system functions, browsing local files as seamlessly as it browses today's Web.