American History 1988
Chapter 324 - 314: The Meeting Gift

Chapter 324: Chapter 314: The Meeting Gift

In the Hilton Hotel in Champaign, Clark met one-on-one with the original seven members of the Mosaic Development Team.

They had all heard about Anderson taking a private plane back again, that direct flight from Silicon Valley to Champaign.

The news made everyone restless, especially when Anderson himself, dressed in an expensive suit, appeared before them.

It was unbelievable; just over a month ago, they were colleagues.

When Anderson was forced to leave NCSA, his carefree attitude did little to conceal his shabbiness.

But that wasn’t all, after meeting with them, the first place Anderson took them to was Champaign’s airport.

He had each of them go up for a glass of red wine, before he took a detour to the Hilton Hotel’s suite.

This move was very effective, as Clark found that these young people became very enthusiastic when conversing with him.

So, taking advantage of the momentum, Clark made his offer.

If they were willing to leave NCSA, then Netscape would provide these young people, currently earning $6.85 an hour, with a base salary of at least $80,000 a year.

In addition, they would get tens of thousands of stock options from Netscape.

"This is the standard issuance amount, and it’s just a meeting gift," Clark assured the young people, in addition to offering to solve their housing problems in Silicon Valley.

These young people didn’t have much savings, and the rent for their apartments would be covered by Netscape for a full year.

This solved their major concern; after all, moving to Silicon Valley meant starting from scratch.

"I’m confident that the value of the stocks you hold will exceed one million US dollars."

Clark made a solemn promise to these youngsters, "But if things go as I hope,

my goal is to multiply your net worth several times over, believe me, this is no fantasy."

However, the young engineers were more enticed by the guaranteed annual salary than the promise of stock options.

The lure of $80,000 was much more appealing than tens of thousands of stock options.

So, things went smoothly, with four young people readily agreeing to Clark’s persuasion on the spot.

The other three also promised to give it serious thought; after all, not everyone has the courage to leave a comfortable environment.

Clark and Anderson didn’t dwell on this and, having scheduled a time with the few who agreed, the two flew back to California.

However, what followed exceeded their expectations; just a week later, the remaining three also began to reach out to them proactively.

This feedback time was much shorter than Clark had expected; he thought it would take one or two months to secure everyone’s agreement.

The reason? It’s simple; the computer science research community in Champaign was too small.

So small that whether or not someone had been recruited by Clark, news spread quickly throughout the community.

This quickly ignited flames of jealousy, envy, and admiration within the circle.

After all, it was Clark, and he had arrived in a private plane personally.

Many had seen that beautiful aircraft, a symbol of status.

So, by February, the original Mosaic development team had already been united at Netscape.

Now, all the talent in America with mature browser development experience had been snatched up by Dean and Clark in one fell swoop.

This was also a form of monopoly, a more invisible one, on the talent level.

There was no need to discuss how frantic NCSA was, although they had already sent a legal letter to Netscape.

But Dean wasn’t concerned at all; there’s no non-compete agreement in California.

Even if it went to court, NCSA would end up empty-handed in the end.

What’s most important now is to develop the next version of Explorer; in fact, Teresa and the others had already done a significant part of the groundwork.

But with the arrival of the Mosaic team, Netscape’s development plans changed.

It is often said that the one who understands you best is your enemy.

As competitors, the Mosaic team understood Explorer’s weaknesses better than Teresa and her colleagues.

"Explorer’s page production is very sophisticated; it includes a lot of images and colors.

That’s indeed a strong attraction for many, but it overlooks one situation."

Anderson and Bina discussed freely in the office, in front of Dean, Clark, Teresa, and a few other key figures from Netscape.

"So what situation did Explorer overlook?" Dean asked with interest.

"I guess when you first developed Explorer, you were using high-performance workstations," Clark and Teresa exchanged glances, perplexed, "Is there something wrong with that?"

"Of course, there’s nothing wrong, but we have to consider the users’ conditions before doing this," with Anderson’s reminder, Dean’s eyebrows rose, "I think I understand.

So Explorer runs smoothly here at Netscape, but that doesn’t mean it runs smoothly for all other users?"

"Exactly!" Anderson and Bina nodded, "Actually, this issue isn’t apparent now.

Because the users who encountered browsers last year were mostly from institutions like the government, enterprises, or universities.

Their hardware was often collectively purchased, equipped with routers like T1 or T3, with broad bandwidth and high speeds.

Even ordinary families with computers that were among the first to access browsers wouldn’t have low-quality machines.

But now, what we’re working on is a new browser intended for mass adoption, so we need to take into account the capabilities of computers with lower configurations."

Personal users obviously don’t have luxurious corporate-level setups; they mainly use phone lines that aren’t much thicker than "drinking straws."

Undoubtedly, the dial-up internet speed of regular households can’t compare to that of large organizations.

According to the latest statistics from the CIX Alliance, the number of internet users in America has already surpassed 15 million.

Research organizations predict that by the middle of this year, this number will conservatively reach 20 million.

And over half of these groups are ordinary household users.

Now, take a look at how many times the Explorer browser has been downloaded so far?

About over two million times; this proportion is too low. A browser should act as a gateway to the internet.

Dean and the others exchanged glances, realizing that Netscape had previously overlooked this issue.

To increase the efficiency of developers, they purchased the best equipment available on the market.

But this "arrogance" made it difficult for Explorer to integrate into the lower end of computer configurations.

They had considered optimization issues, but clearly, its priority was a notch lower than functionality.

No wonder Explorer, with its first-mover advantage, could only capture 60% of the browser market share.

Mosaic, although always a step behind, was not without its merits.

"So the optimization problems with the new version of Explorer will be perfectly solved, right?" Dean turned his gaze toward the two.

"Of course, that’s exactly why we’re here," Anderson and Bainer both expressed full confidence.

"OK," Dean snapped his fingers in satisfaction, "If things go as smoothly as you say,

I promise each of you will own a villa and a sports car in sunny California."

"Wow~" Anderson and Bainer were overjoyed. This was a promise from a super-rich man on the Forbes 400 list.

It was much more reliable than Clark’s airy "each person earns a million US Dollars."

Although the value of the two promises did not differ much upon close comparison, the person making the promise was different.

Anderson and Bainer left full of drive; they were ready to dive into a new round of work.

"Dean, people have gradually started to inquire about Netscape’s news," Clark said, turning to another topic as he watched their backs.

"I know, not just you; I get even more calls," Dean wasn’t surprised.

Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are always the most well-informed.

Although browsers have yet to show a profit until now, their user scale has been substantial enough to draw attention.

As previously mentioned, the number of internet users in America is about to surpass 20 million.

Even though Explorer only has one-tenth of that user base, it has a lot of room to grow.

They also heard that Netscape was developing a new generation of faster, free browsers. If its user base reaches half of the internet users,

that is, if Explorer gains ten million users, it will certainly make money, even if it’s free.

Because these venture capitalists know very well that just a slight added value service could bring unimaginable wealth from that huge group of ten million.

Of course, this is all predicated on the new generation of Explorer being faster and cheaper to use.

Now, Anderson and his team have come at just the right time.

The original Mosaic Development Team, along with the current Netscape team, were all thrown into the development of the new generation browser.

However, because some areas needed improvement, most of the underlying code also had to be rewritten.

This could potentially extend the original development cycle, but it would be worthwhile to create a browser that would work on the vast majority of computers.

The development team was divided into three teams following the previous pattern, corresponding to Windows, Unix, and Mac platforms.

In the race to see whose version was the fastest, they even used a stopwatch to test webpage loading times.

Even the version that took the longest was much faster than NCSA’s Mosaic.

These youngsters, as if they had grown into the computers, worked on screens day and night.

They wore T-shirts and shorts, talking about politics, sports, everything under the sun.

This was the typical state of a Silicon Valley tech company in its startup phase.

Watching them, Dean seemed to see himself the first time he and David developed Teams.

Back then, they too were crammed together, disheveled, bragging, and shooting the breeze just like now.

This is Silicon Valley, where you must endure the most ordinary, the most tedious, the most penniless, yet the most passionately burning times.

Only then might you become one of the lucky ones in the "Silicon Valley lottery."

When it came to David Fero, Dean was also worrying about this situation recently.

As one of the founders of Byte Company, he was about to resign.

Before Byte went public, he had always been in charge of the development work in the technology department.

Later on, as the company grew, a more professional CTO took over this position.

After more than two years of downtime, David, who had already achieved financial freedom, now wanted to find something new to do.

He was still young, not yet thirty, and the comfortable and easy life at Byte had left him a bit lost.

So he approached Dean, proposing to resign from his current position and then planning to take a trip to Neon.

He is said to have taken a teaching assistant position at Stanford University and is now ready to take a student to Neon for research.

Dean always felt he owed David Fero.

Ever since Byte went public, they hadn’t had a heart-to-heart talk in ages.

David stepped down from the CTO position without a word, never even voicing any dissatisfaction to Dean.

Good old David hadn’t changed a bit.

Dean respected his decision to leave Byte, but he also decided to make time for a serious talk with him.

He was too busy now, having just settled Anderson and his team at Netscape.

He was about to hold the annual Byte board meeting, along with the TokTok project, and things at AOL.

Well, it seems Microsoft’s online content service had also been scheduled.

Our Mr. Gates is never late; wherever there’s money to be made, his presence is there.

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