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Jim Clark and Owen Edwards
Netscape Time
The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-up That Took on Microsoft
St. Martin’s Press, 1999
What's inside?
The prescient birth, unprecedented growth and melodramatic sale of Netscape are all part of Jim Clark’s story, so he’s the man to tell it.
Recommendation
Jim Clark offers an adventurous account of the birth and volatile life of Netscape Communications Corp., the company that produced the Web browser that helped make the Internet a household tool. If the rags-to-riches dot-com start-up story has become cliché, bear in mind that when Netscape Navigator arrived on the market, the Internet was still largely the semi-private domain of a few academic oddballs. Due to the seminal role that Netscape played in turning the Internet into the omnipresent force that it is today, Clark’s book does indeed represent an important first draft of history. The key phrase, of course, is first draft. If nothing else, Clark is a salesman and a promoter, and his goal here is to promote Netscape’s version of history - a particularly important goal at a time when the U.S. courts are weighing the fate of the company’s arch nemesis, Microsoft. Nevertheless, future historians will use this book in cobbling together the true tale of the Internet’s origins, as well as the genesis of the stock mania of the late 1990s. getabstract recommends this dramatic, and sometimes even suspenseful book, to all professionals, whose future decisions concerning the Internet will benefit from the de-mythologizing effect of historic perspective.
Summary
About the Authors
Jim Clark is co-founder and chairman of Netscape. He also founded three other tech companies: Silicon Graphics, Healtheon and myCFO.com. Clark is a former high school dropout who eventually earned a doctorate in computer science. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he taught electrical engineering at Stanford. He lives in Florida. Writer Owen Edwards is a consulting editor for Forbes ASAP and lives in San Francisco.
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