<p>They are actually "on-leave," they can continue with their PhD at any time, but why would they?</p>
<p>Maybe once they're old and retired, they will complete it just for the sense of satisfaction. I know some people who are rich and retired and decided to come back to school to get their PhD's for the pure self-satisfaction of it.</p>
<p>Much like SalikSyed said... Both MIT and Stanford are really really good schools for engineering. The OP has already been convinced of that. Things like the atmosphere of the campus are just as important for an applicant, because you'll have the same opportunities for a great education at both schools, but you won't get to play in the snow at Stanford and you'll never see a palm tree here in Mass.</p>
<p>Netscape was founded by a group of U of Illinois graduates.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Netscape was founded by a group of U of Illinois graduates.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>that is correct.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Netscape had a chance to usurp Microsoft but obviously failed spectacularly. The reasons are myriad - Netscape was stupid, Microsoft broke the law, etc., but at the end of the day, now, Netscape is not particularly relevant. The Netscape browser now has less than 1% market share. True, Netscape did form Mozilla, and through that (especially through Firefox), Netscape's legacy will live on. But Netscape as an ongoing business entity is clearly dead.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>who cares about netscape as an ongoing business entity? they changed the world, dude. sure, they lost the war, but they created the market in the first place- and the early employees that mattered made out well. if i had an opportunity to be a part of a company that would ultimately change the world for the better, but might not have a sound business model- i'd be first in line.</p>
<p>Of course Microsoft bought rights to Mosaic from U of IL (via Spyglass) to release its first version of Internet Explorer. So Marc Andreessen, the U of IL alumnus, still has a major legacy in the world of Web browsing today.</p>
<p>
[quote]
who cares about netscape as an ongoing business entity? they changed the world, dude. sure, they lost the war, but they created the market in the first place- and the early employees that mattered made out well. if i had an opportunity to be a part of a company that would ultimately change the world for the better, but might not have a sound business model- i'd be first in line.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yeah, but given the choice between that and the company that actually takes the market? I think I would take the latter. Bill Gates seems to be richer than Andreesen, last time I checked. </p>
<p>But that's neither here nor there. If you want to talk about companies that changed the world (but eventually failed), MIT has many companies like this. For example, I would argue that DEC changed the world too. After all, DEC was the first computer company in the world that was not a mainframe company and thus proved that the old IBM-style mainframe paradigm was not inevitable. In fact, for many years, DEC was the 2nd largest computer company in the world (after IBM). DEC was the first successful truly disruptive company in the computer industry, and thus paved the way for future disruptions in terms of not only changing the mindset of businessmen who could see that non-mainframe business opportunities existed, but also created the culture of hacking, as DEC computers were the first major step towards providing truly affordable computing to guys who just liked programming all day long. For example, UNIX was first written on and for a DEC PDP. Bill Gates as a teenager learned most of his early programming skills on DEC PDP's. In fact, Bill Gates's first real "job" was when he and his friends (including Paul Allen) offered to fix bugs in the software of a local company's PDP in exchange for "payment" in the form of computer time on that PDP. </p>
<p>The point is, the DEC PDP series was the first set of computers that was accessible to hobbyists and hackers. Hence, if DEC hadn't existed, I believe much of the current computer industry (which was built on the culture of hackers) wouldn't even exist. For example, DEC's computers (and its competitive clones) were the first computer systems that were truly affordable to most universities, and it is within universities that the hacking culture really came into being. </p>
<p>Other examples exist of formerly great, now dead MIT companies. Apollo Computer was revolutionary at the time - for most of the 1980's, it was the top workstation manufacturer in the world. LISP Machines, Symbolics Inc., these companies were not highly commercially successful, but were quite important in the shaping of modern computer science. </p>
<p>So if we want to count Netscape as an important contributor to the industry (and thus credit Stanford via its connection of Jim Clark), despite the fact that Netscape failed as a business, then we should credit MIT for its ventures that contributed to the industry, even if those ventures also failed. What's fair is fair. You have to use the same criteria for both sides. You can't just say "Stanford is allowed to count Netscape for its contributions, even though Netscape failed, but MIT is not allowed to count all of its ventures that made contributions but later failed".</p>
<p>bump 10char</p>
<p>wooo.........I assume you guys really enjoy doing research essays.......;)</p>
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Yeah, but given the choice between that and the company that actually takes the market? I think I would take the latter. Bill Gates seems to be richer than Andreesen, last time I checked.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>i couldn't disagree with you more. given the choice i'd rather be working with innovators who succeed at innovation and fail at business than imitators who fail at innovation and succeed at business...</p>
<p>...and they're both rich enough to where it's really fairly irrelevant as to how rich they actually are...</p>
<p>
[quote]
Other examples exist of formerly great, now dead MIT companies. Apollo Computer was revolutionary at the time - for most of the 1980's, it was the top workstation manufacturer in the world. LISP Machines, Symbolics Inc., these companies were not highly commercially successful, but were quite important in the shaping of modern computer science.</p>
<p>So if we want to count Netscape as an important contributor to the industry (and thus credit Stanford via its connection of Jim Clark), despite the fact that Netscape failed as a business, then we should credit MIT for its ventures that contributed to the industry, even if those ventures also failed. What's fair is fair. You have to use the same criteria for both sides. You can't just say "Stanford is allowed to count Netscape for its contributions, even though Netscape failed, but MIT is not allowed to count all of its ventures that made contributions but later failed".
[/quote]
</p>
<p>the question i have is: is stanford failing as badly as mit is at training future engineers and scientists? according to this: (page 10)</p>
<p>the vast majority of mit grads are bailing on science and engineering to make great contributions to society by pursuing the much more important and exciting world of finance and consulting...</p>
<p>scratch that. that figure is of the total undergraduates that head into the workforce. apparently 40-60% of the total graduates each year move on to pursue graduate degress which is very impressive. (and much less depressing)</p>
<p>for a minute there, i was convinced that mit was a corporate drone factory. thank god it's not true!</p>
<p>Wait a minute: Netscape was not that stupid after all;</p>
<p>Netscape had to price their products, while MS could just bundle the internet explorer into Windows OS. Also, MS threatened AOL to cut its support of netscape browser. Netscape is not stupid. It's just been failed to compete with MS.</p>
<p>
[quote]
i couldn't disagree with you more. given the choice i'd rather be working with innovators who succeed at innovation and fail at business than imitators who fail at innovation and succeed at business...</p>
<p>...and they're both rich enough to where it's really fairly irrelevant as to how rich they actually are...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Oh, I would hardly characterize Microsoft as having 'failed' at innovation. Microsoft just innovates in an entirely different way. Keep in mind that before Microsoft, there basically WAS no packaged software industry, and certainly not for consumers. All software was sold as part of hardware, usually at no cost. </p>
<p>Besides, I would point to Microsoft's strong innovations simply on the GUI with Windows. Obviously one can point out that Microsoft was not the first company to come up with the idea of a GUI for the PC (Apple preceded Microsoft, and before that, Xerox Parc had a prototype). But on the other hand, Netscape and Andreesen did not create the first browser. The first browser was probably the Silversmith browser that was launched in 1987, a full 5 years before Andreesen starting developing NCSA Mosaic (which eventually became Netscape). The ViolaWWW browser was also established and already somewhat popular before Mosac. </p>
<p>In fact, Andreesen was quite familiar with the workings of ViolaWWW before they had started to do any work on Mosaic.</p>
<p>**In 1992, Joseph Hardin and Dave Thompson worked at the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputer Applications), a research institute at the University of Illinois. When they heard about Tim Berners-Lee's work, they downloaded the ViolaWWW browser, and then demonstrated the web to NCSA's Software Design Group by connecting to the web server at CERN over the Internet. The group was duly impressed.</p>
<p>Two students from the group, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, began work on a browser version for X-Windows on Unix computers, and released the first version in February, 1993. Bina provided expert coding support. Andreessen provided excellent customer support, monitoring the newsgroups continuously to ensure that they knew about and could fix any bugs and make desired enhancements. **</p>
<p>Here's Tim Berners-Lee, father of the WWW, chronicling the history of the early browers:</p>
<p>**This time around I stand corrected on a couple fronts. First, Tim Berners-Lee checked-in to say I had it wrong when I claimed Mosaic was the first graphical browser. I'll let Tim tell it:</p>
<p>"I wrote the first GUI browser, and called it "WorldWideWeb" for NeXTStep. (I much later renamed the application Nexus to avoid confusion between the first client and the abstract space itself.) Pei Wei, a student at Stanford, wrote "ViolaWWW" for UNIX; some students at Helsinki University of Technology wrote "Erwise" for UNIX; and Tony Johnson of SLAC wrote "Midas" for UNIX. All these happened before Marc (Andreessen) had heard of the Web. Marc was shown ViolaWWW by a colleague (David Thompson?) at NCSA, Marc downloaded Midas and tried it out. He and Eric Bina then wrote their own browser from scratch. As they did, Tom Bruce was writing "Cello" for the PC which came out neck-and-neck with Mosaic on the PC.</p>
<p>"Marc and Eric did a number of very important things. They made a browser that was easy to install and use. They were the first one to get inline images working — to that point browsers had had varieties of fonts and colors, but pictures were displayed in separate windows. Most importantly, he followed up his and Eric's coding with very fast 24 hour customer support, really addressing what it took to make the app easy and natural to use, and trivial to install. Other apps had other things going for them. Viola, for example, was more advanced in many ways, with downloaded applets and animations way back then — very like HotJava.</p>
<p>"Marc marketed Mosaic hard on the net, and NCSA hard elsewhere, trying hard to brand the WWW and "Mosaic": "I saw it on Mosaic" etc. When Netscape started they of course capitalized on Mosaic as you know - and the myth that Mosaic was the first GUI browser was convenient." **</p>
<p>So I don't see how you can claim that Netscape and Andreesen were any more innovative han Gates and Microsoft. * Both * of them basically took ideas from others and ran with them. Neither of their technology ideas were truly original. As Berners-Lee said, the advantage that Mosaic provided was not that it was the first browser (which I think we can all agree, it was not), but rather that it was easy to use, easy to install, was well supported, and was well marketed. Hmmm, that sounds like what Microsoft has done with Windows and Office, now doesn't it? So tell me again exactly why Netscape was innovative and Microsoft is not? </p>
<p>
[quote]
the question i have is: is stanford failing as badly as mit is at training future engineers and scientists? according to this: (page 10)</p>
<p>the vast majority of mit grads are bailing on science and engineering to make great contributions to society by pursuing the much more important and exciting world of finance and consulting...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Oh really? Would you like to come down to Palo Alto and see who the biggest recruiters of engineers and scientists are? Hmmm, what have we here - McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Goldman Sachs, Lehman, etc. etc. What's up with that? And I happen to know a * whole slew * of Stanford grads with engineering degrees who have never worked * a day in their lives * as engineers, instead working as consultants or bankers. So I guess that means that Stanford is failing at training their scientists and engineers properly?</p>
<p>The point is, I see no reason to believe that MIT's students head off to finance or consulting at a more prevalent rate than are Stanford students. If anything, I would suspect that EVEN MORE Stanford students head off to finance and consulting, for the simple reason that Stanford has fewer students who are science/engienernig students relative to MIT. Unlike MIT, Stanford actually has a large humanities student pool, and these students are highly likely to head off to finance or (especially consulting).</p>
<p>
[quote]
Wait a minute: Netscape was not that stupid after all;</p>
<p>Netscape had to price their products, while MS could just bundle the internet explorer into Windows OS. Also, MS threatened AOL to cut its support of netscape browser. Netscape is not stupid. It's just been failed to compete with MS
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, if you want to get into the history of it all, might I suggest that you read the book "High Stakes, No Prisoners" by Charles Ferguson, where the browser wars are retold.</p>
<p>But anyway, let me give you some highlights of where Netscape behaved stupidly.</p>
<p>*Don't taunt the beast. </p>
<p>Netscape was notorious for bragging in the press that they were going to dethrone Microsoft - all before they were ready to go to war. For example, Andreesen once imfamously claimed in the press that they were going to reduce Windows to just a bunch of unimportant buggy device drivers. That is just stupid. After all, if you taunt the beast, you have to know that he's going to charge at you full-force. </p>
<p>From a business strategy standpoint, if you want to get into a war with a big player, that's fine. But you have to be * ready * for it. In particular, Netscape had to know that Microsoft had the power to bundle a browser into its operating system for very cheap or free. After all, Microsoft had been using this exact strategy to kill off numerous competitors before. Most of the little utilities that we take for granted in Windows used to be sold by independent vendors, and when Microsoft bundled them into Windows, those little vendors all disappeared. For example, TCP/IP software (the software that you need to have to get onto the Internet) used to be sold for over $300 by certain vendors. Now it is just a part of Windows, and all those little vendors are gone or doing other things. Shadow memory managers used to be sold separately, until Microsoft bundled them into MS-DOS and Windows. </p>
<p>So the point is, Netscape had to know that Microsoft had the power to bundle an Internet Explorer for free, and so should have prepared accordingly. After all, if you want to start a war with Microsoft, you have to be a fool to not know what powers Microsoft has. Netscape, if it wants to fight a war, has to fight * asymmetrically * - in other words, not taking on Microsoft where it is strong, but hitting it where it is weak. You don't fight Microsoft head-on and expect to win. It's like if you want to beat Michael Jordan, it's easy. Don't play him in basketball. Play him in tiddly-winks or checkers or something that he is not that good at. You don't play him in the game in which he is a superstar in. You choose a different game to play.</p>
<p>So what do I mean by that? Simple. Netscape had to choose a different revenue strategy. What are some possibilities? That leads to my next section:</p>
<ul>
<li>Other strategy options for Netscape</li>
</ul>
<p>1) Become like RealNetworks and sell the server software and tools. RealNetworkswas founded only a few years after Netscape, and basically gave away its client (RealPlayer), bundled with AOL and PC's from Dell and Gateway. Real Networks made most of its money from the multimedia * server * as well as the multimedia authoring tools. Netscape could have done the same - gave away the browser in order to sell the webserver and tools technology. In fact, Netscape did that for awhile and garnered some nice revenue from their server and tools technology. But their primary focus was always on generating revenue from the brower, seemingly not realizing (stupidly) that Microsoft was surely going to bundle the browser into Windows and hence sap all of that revenue. Microsoft had 90% share in the PC operating system market and so can easily do that. But Microsoft didn't have (and still doesn't have) dominant market share in servers. Unix/Linux/mainframe servers hold larger market share than Microsoft servers do. So Netscape could have generated a quite nice business in selling server technology, the same way that RealNetworks created a strong revenue base from selling RealServern and perhaps killed the Apache server project before it was even born (the Apache project was started 3 years after Netscape was founded). The same thing with Tools - the software used to build websites. Netscape could have become Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver or MSFrontpage. There's a very long history in the PC industry of companies giving away software clients in order to make money on the back end via servers and tools. </p>
<p>2) Netscape could have gone 'corporate'. By that, I mean that Netscape could have tailored itself to offer premier information sharing tools for businesses. This strategy could have been combined with strategy #1 above. As an example, look at Adobe. Adobe gives away Acrobat Reader (which allows you to read pdf's) , but makes a lot of money off the regular Adobe Acrobat (which allows you to author and transform pdf's). Netscape could have become the corporate information-sharing software vendor of choice, by helping companies create their own intranets and web-sharing devices. Microsoft is strong in the consumer market, bus is less powerful in the business market. Plenty of businesses pay good money for information sharing software tools for their employees. </p>
<p>3) Netscape could have become Yahoo. For many years, the website Netscape.com was one of the most highly trafficked sites in the world simply because most users never changed their browser homepage. Hence, Netscape had the opportunity to completely corner the Internet advertising market, and this is certainly a market that Microsoft finds difficult to win. Heck, after years of work and billions of dollars of development, Microsoft MSN is * still * an also-ran, compared to Yahoo or Google. Netscape was THE portal of choice but threw it away. </p>
<p>4) Netscape could have become AOL. By that I mean they could have developed a dial-up ISP business. It wouldn't have been that hard, as Netscape could have simply outsourced the entire dial infrastructure to one of the big telcos, and Netscape would have served as just the front-end brand. That's exactly what AOL did for a long time - AOL outsourced much of the dial-up telco infrastructure to MCIWorldcom. Heck, Netscape, through its IPO, had enough money to build its own infrastructure if it wanted to. Plenty of people who used AOL used just the dial-up access to get onto the greater Internet, and didn't care about any of AOL's services. So Netscape could have taken all of those AOL customers, and plenty more who didn't have dial-up access of any kind but who were attracted to Netscape's browser's ease of use. For example, a lot of college students first learned about Netscape at their schools, but when they went home, they had no Internet. I'm quite sure that plenty of them would have been happy to sign up for a Netscape-branded ISP. </p>
<p>Now, obviously hindsight is 20/20. But the point is, if Netscape wanted to start a war with Microsoft, then Netscape should have been ready for it. They should have known that Microsoft was just going to bundle the browser. Microsoft had done this many time before, so it shouldn't have been a shock when they did it again. That's why you have to strategically analyze your business and see what will be hurt by Microsoft entry and what are sustainable revenue streams. That's how you win. You never fight your enemy where he is strong - you fight him where he is weak. That's how you win a war.</p>
<p>Otherwise, don't start the war. Like I said, if you're not prepared to go to war with Microsoft, then don't taunt Microsoft in the press. By doing so, you are just instigating a war that you don't want. In any case, by keeping your mouth shut, you can buy yourself some more time to solidify your business. It may have been true that war with Microsoft was inevitable anyway, but you don't want to * accelerate * the process. If you are going to make inflammatory comments about Microsoft, you have to be ready for Microsoft's competitive response. THAT is the part that was stupid.</p>