Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen, inventor of the first Mosaic Web browser, breezed into GTC West in Sacramento yesterday to prove that -- contrary to media reports -- innovation is not dead. After the dot comm bust the predictions were grim, there would be no new startups, big companies would absorb all the technology, all the innovation. The bubble of the late 90s was gone. "None of that was true," said Andreessen, "not all the ideas of the late 90s made a lot of sense, but rapid change is more true than not."

New technologies such as the PC take years to arrive, said Andreessen, and the Internet is on a similar curve. The Internet was a playground for academics and researchers, and it was not seen as something ordinary people could use. "What happened to the PC from its creation in 1976 to present day maps closely what is happening to the Internet," he explained.

IBM, Apple and Commodore began shipping in the 80s, to great excitement and enthusiasm. Steve Jobs was on the cover of Time Magazine. Venture capital flowed in from 1980 to 1984, and then it unraveled in 1985-87. People lost money. Most of the fifty disk-drive companies in Silicon Valley went bankrupt, people lost their jobs.

Even Intel almost went under in 1985-1988, said Andreessen. Its microprocessor production was growing, but its lucrative memory chip business was decimated by Japanese competition.

Then, in 1991-1993 Intel produced the 386 and Microsoft built Windows 3.1 with a graphical user interface. PCs were being cloned. Innovation broke out all over. "The 3.1 PCs were what everyone wanted and couldn't get," joked Andreessen, "unless they were using a Mac."

Andreessen's Mosaic came along just at the time people wanted to connect their PCs. From 1993-2000 all the companies experienced huge growth, around the PC invented in 1976. Now, nearly three decades later, a billion people have PCs.

Andreessen believes that the next 10 years will be that period of expansion for the Internet, and it will make the last 10 to 15 years look like only the beginning.

Now, said Andreessen, there is more broadband capacity than demand, and prices are cheap. In Silicon Valley, said Andreessen, 6 Megabit DSL costs $50 a month. Moore's law keeps driving up capacity and speed and driving down prices. PCs and hardware are commoditized, and open source software is free. And the best is yet to come.

A year and a half from now, he said, an iPod will have a terabyte of storage. The could concievably come loaded with every piece of music ever recorded. "Nobody in the music industry knows how to deal with that," joked Andreessen, "isn't there a way to stop this? Maybe they will pass laws to repeal Moore's law."

People don't connect to the Internet and become power users overnight, said Andreessen. They start with e-mail and a little Web browsing, a year later maybe they buy something online. The third year they book an airline flight and the following year they add Internet radio, sharing photos with family, etc. In the last five years, 500 million people came online and are progressing through that evolution. In the next five or 10 years, predicted Andreessen, roughly 2 billion people will be online. Consequently, tens of billions of dollars of venture capital is coming in, looking for a startup that will grow into the next Microsoft or Google.

Impact on Government, Business
A complete change is under way in the kinds of tech used by organizations, said Andreessen. The client-server model is being replaced by the Web model, for internal as well as external application.

The cost of developing new Web-based applications is much less than client-server development, he