We were all consumed by Microsoft. Jim Barksdale aged ten years in three. Marc Andreessen is not one to hold his tongue. It’s part of his charm, I guess. He did thumb his nose at Microsoft pretty much continuously. And I did too. I would give speeches, and when I would pound Microsoft a little bit I would always get a rise from the audience. If we had kept the visibility lower and said nothing about Microsoft, it probably would have given us another year. Ram Shriram, who was at Netscape and later at Microsoft, has since told me that Bill Gates and everyone there said we were like the matador waving the red flag. The more we waved, the more it helped him unify the troops to kill us. So it was a bad thing to do in retrospect. But once it got started, we almost couldn’t stop, because the press would egg you on and Marc was the David to the big Goliath. He liked that role. But it was actually misplaced—there was no way the browser was going to replace the operating system.
So a couple lessons. The first is relatively obvious -- pick your battles with those you have a fair chance at defeating, at least initially. Later in the same article, employees mention that multiple tactical mistakes happen because Microsoft turns into a foe too early. Having an enemy can focus you in intense ways, but might focus you on the wrong things. It's a double edged sword.
Lately, in the course of advising and talking to super early stage web startups, I've also often seen the reverse. Many founders starting out worry too much about ___ startup they saw in Techcrunch. Those guys aren't your competitors. Your competitor is the back button. And it is a far more lethal competitor than those bullet point item companies you threw in your Competitors slide. On the other hand, isn't it funny how in 2005 it was still OK to say that there was no way the browser was going to replace the operating system? That strikes me in 2010 as plainly untrue. If anything, the browser will kill Microsoft eventually. It just won't be Netscape doing the killing.