Re: BofA+Netscape

[marca@neon.mcom.com (Marc Andreessen)]

At 3:08 PM 12/11/94, James A. Donald wrote:
>Amanda complained that Netscape pisses all over the
>standardization committees.
>
>Well guys, the victor has room to move.  It must come as a big
>shock to Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, but reality is that Netscape
>can set WWW standards and they cannot.
>
>If they indulge the standardization committees by listening to 
>them first, and then deciding to ignore them, the committee
>should be thoroughly greatful.

For the record, we're not trying to set standards -- we're trying
to build products with functionality that our customers want and
need.  We'll succeed or fail on the basis of whether we do that,
not whether or because we set standards.  We fully realize that
being proprietary or isolated from existing or future standards
only locks us out of our market, which does us no good at all.
That doesn't mean that we're not going to innovate when we need
to, but it means we're not going to be anything other than
totally open and standards-compliant.  To that end, we aggressively
support all current standards (HTML, HTTP, URLs, NNTP, Gopher, SOCKS,
FTP, you name it), are a charter member of W3O (with a concomitant
$150K commitment), and from day 1 have made SSL available to the broader
community and have given it to the W3O security working group (of
which we are a full participant) exactly in parallel with SHTTP and the
three or four other proposals that have been submitted for
consideration by other companies and third parties.

I fully expect we'll be supporting other security standards and
approaches as they emerge, and we certainly welcome realistic suggestions 
on what we should do, when, and how.

Cheers,
Marc


--
Marc Andreessen
Netscape Communications Corporation
Mountain View, CA
marca@mcom.com