Marc Andreesen grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, a town with a population of less than 2000. To support the family, his father sold agriculture-seeds. In 1989, Andreesen enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Electrical Engineer major. When the work became difficult, Andreesen switched majors to Computer Science, being "a big fan of work avoidance" (Goodell 43). During his senior year, Andreesen worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, "a high-tech think tank on campus" (Goodell 43). It was there that the Netscape Communications Corporation had its beginnings.

At the center, Andreesen realized the need for a user-friendly Internet browser. The current browsers made navigating the web difficult and they did not allow for showing graphics and text at the same time. The main users of the Internet were researchers, but for other people, the browsers displayed nothing more then complex pages of coding. Andreesen wanted to develop a browser that would allow more people to use the Internet, being easier to use by showing pages without codes, showing graphics and text simultaneously, and allowing people to jump from page to page quickly and easily through "hypertext" links. According to Andreesen, "the computer must become easier to use. Only then will it expand its hold from 3% of the world’s population to the 20% that [he] sees as the next natural plateau" (Jenkins, Jr. A24).

Sharing his ideas with his "gifted hacker" friend, Eric Bina, the two built on what they had seen and hacked out a new Web browser with the help of a few other colleagues at the Center and other people working on similar projects around the world via telecommunications. It took about six weeks, and when it was completed, they named it Mosaic and distributed it free on the Internet. Mosaic was originally written to be used on Unix workstations, but versions for Macs and PCs quickly followed. Within a few months, millions of people were using it. Andreesen is given credit for developing the first user-friendly browser that revolutionized the use of the Internet. The impact on society was tremendous; the general public was now able to use the Internet quickly and easily, without having to wade through lines and lines of code to find what they were looking for. It was also the start of new web sites, unrelated to scientific research.

After graduating from the University of Illinois, Andreesen heard from Jim Clark, "a pioneering entrepreneur in Silicon Valley" who had read about Andreesen’s project in a newspaper article (Goodell 43). In 1994, Andreesen and Clark "co-founded Netscape Communications Corporation and created a commercial version of Mosaic, called Navigator" (Browsers 31). Since then, their biggest competitor has been Internet Explorer, which bundled their browser with new computers for free, while Netscape’s Navigator was being sold for $49. Still, although Explorer was free, and some say, has a "better user interface," it only runs on Windows operating systems, while Navigator runs on Windows, Macintosh, and Unix platforms (Browsers 32). Until 1997, Netscape maintained a 70% market share (Browsers 31). By May, 1998, Andreesen had made $52 million (Reitman 6) and Netscape was running on about 80% of computers connected to the Web (Goodell 42). From 1996 to 1997, Netscape experienced a 100% growth in business and employees (Sliwa 94). However, Microsoft started approaching computer manufacturers and offering to charge less for Windows if the company bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, but more for Windows if the company chose Netscape instead, leading to a decrease in use of Netscape (Goodell 46). One advantage Netscape has over Microsoft, however is that it does not have an operating system franchise to protect; it can just focus on offering a product and service set (Sliwa 95).

Once the Netscape Navigator was established, Andreesen turned to other projects and ideas. The goal of Netscape’s Enterprise Migration Program was to make it easier for users to adopt new technology, such as network connections. Andreesen also feels that business-to-business electronic commerce is exploiting "a lot of the foundation technologies that the Web has provided, including secure messaging, security, and directories" (Sliwa 95). Andreesen has been focusing on using e-commerce to structure his relationships with suppliers and distributors to get everything going the way it should over the networks (Sliwa 95). Finally, Andreesen strongly believed that software companies would give away products and focus on building services instead and that the Internet would encourage users to adopt freeware technology (Weil 68). Netscape itself led the way for this trend when it "began giving away its Communicator source code and boost[ed] its Netcenter site on the World Wide Web" (Weil 69).

Andreesen is not interested in running the actual day-to-day activities of his company. He leaves that to others and focuses on ideas, "constantly scouring the technological landscape for the next big thing" (Reitman 6). Netscape’s headquarters are in Mountain View, California. "There, [Andreesen] has three orders to his staff of nearly 2000: Be innovative; get things done; and do it now, before someone else beats you to it...If we slow down, somebody’s going to eat our lunch" (Reitman 6).

Last November, America Online acquired Netscape Communications Corporation: the $4.2 billion merger was not completed until this February. Andreesen became AOL’s "chief technology officer...and will report to AOL Chairman and CEO Steve Case" (America Online Fills Job 9). He will be responsible for "evaluating emerging technologies and reaching out to the wider technology community" (America Online Fills Job 9). Andreesen will also focus on AOL’s strategy of "becoming ubiquitous on many computing platforms at once, dubbed, ‘AOL Anywhere’ (Nathan 01B), but will not "oversee any of AOL’s day-to-day technical operations" (Swartz C1).

More than just physical, the merger is also symbolic. People have viewed AOL as not really caring about its consumers. Andreesen agreed with this view at first, but now realized that he was wrong, saying that AOL "gave the public what they wanted" (Swartz C2). Andreesen’s role in the merger is critical in "merging AOL’s consumer-oriented focus with Netscape’s technical expertise" and Jim Balderston of Zona Research in Redwood City believes that it "sends a reassuring signal to Netscape’s engineers that AOL is serious about technology" (Swartz C2).

So, what does Andreesen’s future look like? His new venture is in the television industry. Andreesen has invested in Replay Networks, Incorporated, a new small Silicon Valley company. Its goal is to create a digital television recording system, with an initial retail price of $999. It has a hard-drive similar to that of a computer, and on it compresses and records cable or satellite TV programming signals coming into the house. Software inside allows users to "easily select programs up to two weeks in the future to record on the disk drive for later viewing, as well as pause, fast forward and review programming that they’re currently watching and that’s still being recorded" (Ellis A23). For example, a person can program the system to record all movies with a particular actor and to skip all of the commercials.

It is expected that Microsoft and other companies will catch on and produce these systems, dropping the retail price to $199. It is also expected that people will adopt this new technology more quickly than the VCR because it is so much easier to use. Companies will no longer invest much money in commercials, realizing that people are not going to be watching them, and instead spend money on advertising at live events. Viewers will be totally able to control the content and time they watch their programs, even if the programs overlap. HBO, Showtime, and other such channels will be unaffected.

While Andreesen has been generally accepted as the Wonder Boy that revolutionized the world of computing and the Internet, he has had his share of critics. An article in GQ: Gentlemen’s’ Quarterly, entitled "Imposter Boy" was written by Alan Deutschman in 1997. He calls Andreesen a fraud and a liar, claiming that the idea for Mosaic was not his, generated at a cafe, as generally accepted, but instead, the idea of Dave Thompson, who also worked at the Center. Deutschman claims that Andreesen’s browser was not the first, that he did not write much of the program, and that it was not even his project--he just stole it from Thompson when he went to an out-of-town conference. Thompson believes his mistakes include showing the early, complex browsers to Andreesen, sharing his ideas with Andreesen, and going out of town. Had he not, he might be the multi-millionaire today. Finally, Deutschman writes that Andreesen abandoned his team members when he joined Jim Clark and did not mention any of their names.

GQ is a popular magazine, and "Imposter Boy" is written by what seems like a bitter man, who talked with Andreesen’s bitter colleagues, who colored their story to make Andreesen look like the bad guy. After all, he is the multi-millionaire, not them. Also, it seems that if Deutschman’s arguments were true, they would have been found in other articles, which they were not.