High Stakes, No Prisoners - Charles Ferguson

I just finished this great book about the first 5 years of the Internet and the many changes it brought to the high technology companies and everybody's life in general.

Written by one of the founders of Vermeer Technology (creator of Front Page, later sold to Microsoft), the  book is an excellent presentation of the rise and fall of Netscape, the Internet revolution and of course Microsoft, both the smartness of the company and the predatory behaviour.

There are so many interesting things in the book and on so many topics like:

- everything about a high tech start up
- why is Microsoft so successful at destroying other companies
- venture capitalist practices
- how to create a software product architecture
- how to hire and not to hire a CEO
- and many others

Some of my favourite paragraphs are below:


- Whether through haste, overconfidence or ignorance, in 1994 and 1995 Netscape 
made a series of catastrophic technical and strategic errors that eventually proved their 
undoing. These included sloppy, indeed almost non-existent, technical architecture; 
foolish, immature hype that awakened Microsoft; failure to create proprietary advantage; 
failure to generate 3rd party support and lock-in;poor testing and quality control; 
excessive attention to minore markets to the neglect of windows

- the next mistake was the hiring of a non-technical CEO

- the CEO of a serious high technology company must have a serious technical 
background, or at least the ability to understand technology and a deep appreciation of 
its importance in strategic and organizational decisions

- i have a generally low opinion of professional CEOs, although some are superb. They 
frequently have poor technical backgrounds, no concern for anything other than their 
bank accounts, and skills that are more political than substantive. And their track records 
are not great. Of the industry's most successful companies, there's only one - Cisco - that 
has been run for a long time by a conventional professional CEO. Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, 
Aol, Compaq, Dell and Gateway are all run by founders, early employeesand/or former 
academics who somehow do okay despite not having Harvard mbas and perfect resumes. 
When you stack them up against the people responsible for the last 20 years performance 
of Apple, IBM, Netscape and Lotus and many others, you come away thinking that 
unqualified, socially dysfunctional, impatient, ruthless, egomaniacal founders arent so 
bad after all

- writing a clever piece of code that works is one thing; designing something that can 
support a long-lasting business is quite another. Commercial software design and 
production is, or should be, a rigurous, capital - intensive activity. Software products 
should be based on a broad, deep structure that can support much more than whatever 
the product contains at any given time. In addition to code that works, you need 
documentation, help functions, error handling, multi-platform support, and multiple 
languages. You also need an underlying architecture that allows you to add and 
change features, purchase and integrate external software components, and allow 
other software vendors to make their products talk to yours, add customized widgets to 
it, or embed your product into something larger of their own. A good architecture, one 
that will carry you for a decade's worth of unpredictable technology and market 
changes, takes months to develop. But if  you skip this step, as Netscape did, you 
have made a truly Faustian bargain

- one goal of good architecture is to enable systems to be partitioned so that people 
can work effectively in parallel, their progress can be measured periodically and 
everyone can finish at the same time

- There were lots of kids and Unix people at Netscape, but few seasoned technologists 
with PC software experience. Andreessen's job as chief technology officer was 
supposedly deciding what Netscape's future products should be. But he had no 
experience, and there was no chief architect; so for architectural change, who was 
minding the store? Moreover, of the entire top management team, only one person 
had any experience with a pc succssful software company

- the mangling of large companies by polished, politically astute, non-technical CEOs, 
which is a major part of what happened at Netscape, is a movie that Silicon Valley 
has seen many times before. ….. firing highly visible CEOs is all too rare, no matter 
how bad they are. Ben Rosen has done it twice, when he replaced the CEO of 
Compaq in 1991 and again in 1999. More often, however, everyone sits around, 
afraid to be the first to blow the whistle and provoke a fight. But by the time an obvious 
crisis forces action, it's often too late. 

- Netscape's story also provides a remarkable case study in how to run a high tech 
company, and how not to, at both strategic and operational levels. 

- Perhaps never in American history has a new company faced larger opportunities 
and such profound choices as Netscape did.

- Netscape's browser was a mess from the very beginning. Their first browser was 
relatively simple, so choosing hacker style and spaghetti code to reach the market 
fast was tempting. But there is a general rule in software engineering that the cost of 
fixing an error doubles with every step down the engineering sequence, from initial 
conception to architecture to commercial release, and these costs continue to double 
with subsequent releases. 

- Navigator 1.0 had almost no architecture. In Netscape's rush to market, it was 
conceivably justifiable to do this. Even if so, the failure to fix it immediately by developing 
a real architecture for the next product was utterly, totally fatal. Navigator 1.0 was 
throwaway code that they didnt throw away.

- underlying each of the next browsers (navigator 2.0, 3.0, 4.0) was the non-architected 
faustian bargain of the navigator 1.0. With each release, Netscape's cost structure, 
technical limitations and development times worsened relative to Microsoft's, as did its 
ability to support new features and interfaces, with the result that Netscape's lead, which 
was at least a year, was eliminated within two years

- Netscape's failure to architect its browser was just one of many engineering errors. 
Another, also serious, concerned testing. Software quality assurance is a complex activity, 
with a range of best practices and capital-intensive software tools for automating testing, 
bug tracking and error correction. For complex products, you even design the testing 
systems into the original architecture of the product. That's not the way Netscape did it, to 
put it mildly. According to some reports, Navigator 1.0 testers were hired by placing notes 
on bulletin boards offering to hire random college students at ten dollars per hour. A 
dangerous casual attitude toward QA persisted even well after Netscape had focused 
on mission critical application and server products for conservative, quality-conscious
 Fortune 500 clients

- during the development of Communicator 4.0, Netscape allocated about half of its 
browser development team to an effort to redesign the browser from scratch, using the 
java language. It would be difficult to exxagerate the idiocy of this choice. At this writing, 
nobody yet uses Java to write large Windows applications, because its performance is 
still mediocre and its tools, environment and user interfaces are insufficiently mature. 
After a few months, Netscape canceled the effort

- Netscape went to great lengths to make its own life more difficult and succeeded.

- Netscape decided to develop its early browsers so that they can be developed and 
released for many operating systems simultaneously, not just the multiple versions of
 Windows but also the McIntosh, OS/2 and a half dozen varieties of Unix. These operating 
systems and their user interfaces are fundamentally different from one another. 
Consequently, Netscape developed a major piece of software, the Netscape portable 
runtime layer that covered up the specific features of various operating systems. Netscape 
developers then wrote code targeted to this generic intermediate layer rather than to 
specific operating systems. This decision was an enormous strategic error. …. it was a 
major technological and engineering disaster. It meant that Netscape deprived itself of the 
best available tools for developing software, particularly for Windows.


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