It’s a huge small-business opportunity. It’s a useful opportunity for a number of reasons. For one, you can go global just like that; you are by default. Another implication is that you can have a presence that is equal to or superior to any major company … it’s going to be a tremendous innovation and lower the barrier for a lot of businesses.
Predictor: Andreessen, Marc
Prediction, in context:The following was taken from a transcript of a 1995 video interview of Marc Andreessen, conducted for the Smithsonian Institution by David K. Allison, curator of the division of information technology and society at the National Museum of American History: ”I think it’s a huge small-business opportunity. It’s a useful opportunity for a number of reasons. For one, you can go global just like that; you are by default. Another implication is that you can have a presence that is equal to or superior to any major company; in fact you see that quite often on the Net. Some of the small companies on the Net have much more impressive content, much more impressive services available than many of the large companies. Many big companies aren’t even there yet. For a lot of small companies it should be considerably cheaper and easier to bring up a small business than it ever has been before. We’re starting to see that now especially in the Valley. It’s going to become a lot easier for people to bring up services that are exclusively electronic. For example, the cost of setting up a server – if you set up a server yourself, you buy all the hardware, you buy all the telecommunications – you’re only talking about a start-up fee of maybe $15,000, and a couple of thousand dollars a month. That is not very much money to run a business. If you’re an established business and you want to distribute marketing material on the Net, that amount is far less than you would pay for most activities involve paper, color brochures and things like that. I think it’s going to be a tremendous innovation and lower the barrier for a lot of businesses.”
Biography:Marc Andreessen worked with Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in 1992, to develop a browser that would be usable on any computer, easy to use and graphically rich. In 1993, their browser, Mosaic, completely changed the face of the Internet Ð it allowed HTML “image” tags which make it so text and art can appear on the same page; it allowed easy text scrolling; and it introduced hyperlinks, allowing users to simply click on an area of the screen to go to another document on the Internet. In1994, Mosaic was developed and marketed; the product eventually was named Netscape. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: June 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: E-commerce
Name of publication: Smithsonian Institution Oral and Video Histories
Title, headline, chapter name: Marc Andreessen
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/ma1.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Allen, Patrick J.