![]() Netscape's stock was first offered at $28 a share. The success of Netscape's IPO has been credited with starting the investor craze for Internet start-ups that lasted until the end of the decade. Its initial public offering (IPO) was one of the hottest of the 1990s and one of the first for Internet-based companies. Without having turned a profit, Netscape went public on August 9, 1995. The next step was to raise money in the public equity market by going public. In order to raise more capital, the company sold an 11-percent interest to a consortium of media and computer companies that included Adobe Systems, International Data Group (IDG), Knight-Ridder, TCI, and Times Mirror. The development and introduction of Netscape Navigator drained nearly all of Netscape's capital. The first officially branded Netscape Enterprise Server product, version 2.0, was released in March 1996, and corporate sales accounted for some 80 percent of Netscape's revenue that year. Large companies found that Netscape's Web servers could communicate easily with outside networks, and Netscape gained a 70-percent market share among the Global Fortune 100 companies in the lucrative corporate intranet market. Netscape also marketed its servers to corporate customers for their corporate intranets, where orders could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was a time when electronic commerce over the Internet was in its infancy, and Netscape was providing a key element that would help it to achieve explosive growth in the coming years. Netscape's Web servers, which sold for between $1,500 and $50,000 each, enabled companies to create online or "virtual" stores where customers could view products and purchase them online with credit cards. Version 1.0 of Netscape's NetSite Web Server was released in December 1994. The easy availability of the Web browser created a lot of goodwill for Netscape, which the company hoped to capitalize on by selling high-priced software and Web servers that were used to build and run Web sites. By early 1996 it had signed up more than 1,000 Internet service providers to distribute Navigator to their customers. The company signed up resale partners, including Apple, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and others, and by 1996 was selling products in 29 countries. Netscape also sold an improved version of Netscape Navigator for $40. The open architecture concept, known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), was the same concept upon which the Internet was based. Netscape Navigator featured an open architecture that enabled it to work with all kinds of computers and operating systems. It was an immediate hit, and Netscape claimed to have captured 70 to 75 percent of the browser market. Interested users could simply download it using a modem. Like Mosaic before it, Netscape Navigator was distributed for free over the Internet. WEB BROWSER MADE INTERNET MORE ACCESSIBLE Jim Barksdale, formerly with AT&T's McCaw Cellular division and Federal Express, was hired as the company's CEO in January 1995. Netscape Navigator shipped in December 1994. While the development team wanted to call it Mozilla, short for Mosaic Killer, the company's marketing executives insisted on calling it Netscape Navigator. He persuaded several NCSA team members to join him at Netscape, and the company soon released its new browser. His job was to make the Web browser Mosaic faster and more interactive. Andreessen, then 22 years old, became Netscape's vice president of technology. However, NCSA, which held the copyright to the Mosaic software, objected and the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corp. Established in April 1994 with $4 million in start-up capital from Clark, the company was first called Mosaic Communications Corp. Andreessen had recently graduated from college when he was contacted by Clark, and the two decided to combine Andreessen's technical know-how with Clark's business expertise to launch their own company. When Mosaic was made available for free over the Internet in 1993, more than 2 million copies were downloaded in the first year.Īndreessen had been part of the team of programmers that developed Mosaic in 1993 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where he was attending college. It made the Web accessible to a wide range of users and was responsible for a 10,000-fold increase in Web users over a period of two years. Mosaic was a graphical user interface (GUI) for the World Wide Web that integrated text, graphics, and sound. Having left SGI earlier in the year, Clark contacted Andreessen with a proposal to start a new company to develop an improved version of Mosaic. Clark, a former associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, had founded Silicon Graphics Inc.
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