The New Software - panic in the year zero

Back in hazy Los Angeles, hair had grown dangerously high. In the wake of MTV's timely discovery of heavy metal, the City of Angeles sent out a casting call for multiplatinum blondes and abusers of hair products of all kinds....To anyone with rock-star dreams the smog of second-hand cigarette smoke and hair spray was an enchanting mist. -- Heavy Metal

All booms are sociologically the same - stemming from a core belief that "the xxx (fill in your new new thing here) changes everything. That was 1984, but the scene was repeating in 1994 up north in Silicon Valley. Microsoft was still riding Windows 3.1, with the release of W95 still imminently a year away. Oracle was making big money again, with a successful Oracle 7 DB release, and some momentum on the applications side. SAP was rising to rule the business apps world, with a tailwind from Y2K fears, and strong pull on the delivery side from the consulting world.

Little did any of them know that the hottest action was off in the cornfields of Champaign, IL. By now the Children of the Corn (Andreesen, et. al) are famous and rich, but back then they rose to fame on the realization that computers don't "think" (any more than, as Edsgar Dijkstra dryly noted, [submarines "swim"](http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/klaeren/sprueche/192.html)). They may compute, but MSFT and ORCL had the business sewn up. What they didn't do yet was communicate, and the CotC took Tim Berners Lee's collaborative innovation and gave it a universal front end.

By 1994 the early wave were downloading prototype browsers, and pointing them at the "World Wide Web" to see if anything was there. There wasn't that much out there yet, and there was almost no ability to find anything, but the promise was real. This was the age ad-hoc tools and services, most of which were to be evolutionary dead-ends that couldn't answer the question "how can we make money at this and scale it?"

Netscape answered the question by lopping the first half off of it, and answering the rest. If software was all about scale, then Netscape was all about scale, with VC funding solving the money problem, and the web itself solving the distribution problem.

The Netscape IPO on August 9, 1995 marked the point of departure - 18 months from inception to IPO, a $2B market cap, all without a clear revenue model! Scale and standards-invention/control were the keys to software wealth, and Netscape had a lock on them for this new "web" thing.

The new new thing in software was off and running.