SAN MATEO (10-23-95) - Marc Andreessen, vice president of technology at Netscape Communications Corp., believes the World Wide Web will evolve into an open platform for distributing corporate data. He explains how to InfoWorld reporter Nick Wingfield.
INFOWORLD: Are you concerned about the perception that the Internet is an insecure place to do business?
ANDREESSEN: I think it's extremely healthy that people are concerned about security. There are certainly a lot of security issues involved in any area of network computing. The story of networking is the story of figuring out what the balance is between interconnections and security. So from that sense there's not really anything new here with respect to the Internet. I think that security in any particular product is certainly a process over time. I think that our products are now more secure than they were two weeks ago. I like the fact that people are out there beating the hell out of our products.
INFOWORLD: What are the compelling applications of the Internet for IS managers?
ANDREESSEN: Most of your readers today are actually now in the process of starting to deploy internal Webs in their companies. It's a pretty universal phenomenon. I think if you go talk to any cross-section of your readers you'll discover that. And what they're doing is reacting to a couple of things. For the first time in a long time, there's a commonly accepted networking infrastructure. Everybody is running TCP/IP.
You've got the emergence of this new class of software which has a lot of benefits compared to old largely proprietary systems from traditional software vendors. You've got the properties of being able to run truly cross-platform applications from software vendors that don't have a vested interest in any particular operating system or box. You've got the ability to do network-centric applications rather than desktop-centric applications. You've got the ability to take all this data in all these disparate database systems that you've got scattered all over your company and start to pull them together.
All these really fundamental shifts, the fact that [IS managers] made this huge investment in all this internal infrastructure, means that all of a sudden software like ours starts to make a lot of sense. It's such an apparent thing for them ... that in many cases we find they actually build it themselves. They build gateways to their own databases; they build their own discussion group links, they build their own linkages to their existing Oracle databases. So that compels us to produce better tools to make it easier for them to do that, which is what we're doing.
INFOWORLD: So you're talking about going into mainstream database applications?
ANDREESSEN: In a typical large heterogeneous enterprise network, data is going to be scattered across lots and lots of different repositories. And a lot of them are relational [databases] on network servers and mainframes. The data, still today, is ... pretty hard to get at; it requires customized front-end applications. One of the ironic things coming out of the client/server area is that we've taken a step backwards by requiring everyone to have a custom application to access databases.
What [the Web] provides is a layer that sits on top of all that. If they want to, [users] can reach out to their Oracle database. They can reach out to their Lotus Notes document. IBM is building [Web] gateways into DB2 for MVS. Plus employees are putting up personal Home pages, so for the first time people in different parts of the company know who others are. Project status is being tracked on-line, which lets people stay aware of what's going on. Marketing materials are up there. The sales force is using it as a resource. HR is using it as a resource. It starts to build pretty quickly. I think [internal Webs are] a pretty universal phenomenon at this point.
INFOWORLD: Some people have accused Netscape of manipulating the HTML [Hypertext Mark-up Language] standard by adding its own extensions. How do you respond to that?
ANDREESSEN: We innovate. And when we innovate we publish what we do. The traditional way the Internet-standards processes work is that somebody does something and then says, "Look everybody. Here's what I did." Either it gets added to the standard or it becomes the [de facto] standard. Lots of companies are making innovations in lots of different areas.
INFOWORLD: Microsoft has added its own HTML extensions. How are Netscape and Microsoft going to resolve the interoperability issues for browsers?
ANDREESSEN: People expect the standards process to be rational and harmonious. I don't know of a standards process that's ever been rational. What happens is a lot of people innovate. We're like 3Com or Cisco: If we start providing a product that isn't interoperable with everybody else's, we have no business. Customers walk away. We give away SSL [Secure Sockets Layer], we publish all the HTML extensions, we publish Secure Courier source code. We picked up Java because it looked like there was going to be enough industry support that we wouldn't have to create something on our own.
INFOWORLD: With the Internet, are we headed toward a situation where people are going to be charged for information and not just network access?
ANDREESSEN: We're in a world right now where there's some information people can charge for if they want to. One of the problems with the Internet historically is that there hasn't been that much information of value out there. There was always this myth that the Internet was like the Library of Congress. That's always been false.
INFOWORLD: Publishers don't seem to understand the Internet as a publishing medium yet. People are trying to take existing products and just fold them into the new medium.
ANDREESSEN: Which is exactly what radio people tried to do when TV arrived, exactly what happened when silent screen movie people tried to do talkies. The first talking movies ... First movies in general were people pretty much just standing there because that's what you could do on stage.
INFOWORLD: How does the medium change how people should devise their content?
ANDREESSEN: What's become more apparent in the last few years is that publishers have got these huge economies of scale. All of the sudden on the 'net there are no economies of scale. It really doesn't matter how big you are. If your content is better, then you're bigger. The next big wave that's going to hit is when lots of bandwidth is available, when efforts like @Home roll out.
All of a sudden print publishers can start producing video, which is a new thing. So can everyone else. That's going to be fun to watch. That's going to be the big hit because everyone in the world is so focused on video right now.
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