SGI Founder Hires Mosaic Creators

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

From: Robert Hertzberg <rob () ost com>


I thought the following story, from the May issue of Internet
Business Report, might be of wide interest. Hence I am
posting it to this group.
"Mosaic Creators Bolt NCSA To Join Commercial Venture--
    Team With Silicon Graphics Founder"


The founder and former chairman of Silicon Graphics Inc. has
hired away the core team of developers who created Mosaic
at a decidedly not-for-profit organization--the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications.


The hires made by Jim Clark, who left Silicon Graphics in
January, will help his budding firm develop a line of
Internet-related products. Clark said those products would
involve "multimedia on the Internet," but he declined to
be more specific.


Mark Andreessen, co-developer of the first version of Mosaic at NCSA,
was the first Mosaic developer that Clark sought out. The 22-year-old
Andreessen--who already had left NCSA and was working at a Palo Alto
research firm when Clark called him on the day Clark left Silicon
Graphics--actually will be a co-founder of the new company.


To build their new company, which tentatively is being called
Electric Media Company (another California company's use of that
name may force them to come up with something different), Clark
and Andreessen last month approached a number of Andreessen's
former NCSA colleagues who played key roles in developing Mosaic.
NCSA is a non-profit organization funded by the National Science
Foundation and affiliated with the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.


Five NCSA developers accepted Electric Media's offer and are to
begin working for the start-up company this month. The dozen or so
employees at Electric Media also include some former workers at
Silicon Graphics, which, like Electric Media, is based in
Mountain View, Calif.


While at Silicon Graphics, Clark played a major role in Silicon
Graphics' entering into a joint development agreement with Time
Warner Cable to deliver interactive cable television to consumers.
That effort has since fallen behind schedule, and Clark said he's
now convinced that real-time switched digital video is "still a
solid three years away before it's being deployed in any significant
volume." The Internet, on the other hand, "is about to explode,"
Clark said.


The five NCSA developers who have joined Electric Media are Eric
Bina, who along with Andreessen co-developed the first version of
Mosaic, which was for X-Window machines; Aleks Totic, who developed
the Macintosh version of Mosaic; Chris Houck, who has done much of
the cross-platform work with Mosaic; Rob McCool, an expert in HTTP
development; and Jon Mittelhauser, who co-developed the Windows
version of Mosaic. Bina, Totic and Houck were all full-time NCSA
employees. McCool is still an undergraduate at the University of
Illinois, and Mittelhauser, who recently received a master's
degree in computer science, held a research assistantship at NCSA.


The other developer of WinMosaic, Chris Wilson, also left NCSA
recently to work for a commercial company. Wilson is at Spry, the
Seattle-based company that is developing Internet-In-A-Box.


Clark, 49, said the idea of starting a technology company by
hiring university students--or those fresh out of a university--
is nothing new. Clark did it himself in 1981 when he left a full-time
assistant professorship at Stanford to found Silicon Graphics. Silicon
Graphics has since mushroomed into a $1.3 billion company and made
Clark into a multimillionare.


"The basis for a good company is a bunch of people who know how to
work together already, and have in mind an objective to go after that
has good commercial potential," Clark said. "I look at this as Jim
Clark investing in Marc Andreessen." Clark said that while he himself
would run the business--providing the connections and, for now, the
capital--Andreessen would be "the technical visionary."


The exodus of Mosaic developers from NCSA raises questions for
commercial Mosaic users about how much improvement there will be in
future free versions of Mosaic. "There are obviously gaps" now in
the skill sets needed to do the work, said one of the developers
who has left NCSA.


Joseph Hardin, associate director of the software development group
at NCSA, characterized the departures as a natural evolution. He noted
that NCSA will be replacing those who have left, a process it already
has begun by bringing in as its new technical manager for collaborative
technologies Larry Jackson, who was previously principal engineer for
General Dynamics in Newport, R.I.


According to several of the former NCSA developers, Mosaic's overnight
popularity created a dilemma for the non-profit NCSA: How, and whether,
to take advantage of Mosaic's revenue-generating potential. NCSA has
continued to give Mosaic away free to individuals, but organizations
that want to develop commercial products based on the software have had
to pay a licensing fee that has struck some of them as exorbitant.


"I felt alternately that we were giving Mosaic away too cheaply, and
that we were being far too greedy," said one of the NCSA alumni. He
said "there was much dissatisfaction over this" among Mosaic's
developers.


Another developer, however, said he thought Mosaic development had
reached the point where it needed to move into the commercial world,
"where people can move faster."


To be sure, the NCSA developers also were lured by a carrot that just
doesn't exist at not-for-profit organizations--the prospect of big
financial success. "There's basically no opportunity for advancement
[at NCSA]--no review process by which people are given raises,"
said one NCSA-turned-Electric Media developer.


That won't be a problem for anyone at Electric Media if a Jim Clark
company hits pay dirt again.





--
Rob