Marc Andreessen's Five Big Ideas That Have Shaped the Internet

20 years ago, a computer science student at the University of Illinois had an idea. You shouldn’t have to be a computer scientist to use the internet, he thought, and once they know what you can do with it, everybody will want it. In 1992, this was a radical-and quite early-idea.

As it turned out, that student was Marc Andreessen and in 1993 he and Eric Bina, would go on to release Mosaic, the first graphical browser for the internet. That was one of five evenly forward ideas that have moved from his head out into the world, as Chris Anderson elucidates in an interview with Andreessen in the May issue of Wired.

1. “Everyone Will Have the Web”An information deprived small-town boy who all of a sudden found himself with a high-speed data connection, Andreessen realized without warning what a quantum leap the internet would be for the lives of ordinary people. By making the web easier to use with a graphical browser, he opened the way for the information-rich world we are now living in.

2. “The Browser Will Be the Operating System”Andreessen may have lost the “browser war” to Microsoft, however with his second big idea he has in actual fact proved victorious. The browser has become so central to desktop and now mobile computing that even Microsoft has had to rethink its business from the ground up. Google, in particular, has embraced this approach with their Chrome OS and many of the apps that most people use every day reside on the network.

3. “Web Business Will Live in the Cloud”As a corollary to the primacy of the browser, Andreessen was the first to understand and articulate cloud computing for software and web services, and how that would effect businesses. Because he was early and because of the timing of the first tech bubble, his company, Loudcloud, didn’t break out. Nevertheless Amazon, in particular, has created amazingly affordable computing infrastructure for  businesses much along the lines that Andreessen foresaw.

4. “Everything Will Be Social”Andreessen saw that the anonymity of the early web would give way to hierarchies of social networks based on identity. During others were looking at the way Moore’s Law predicted the increase in computer’s processing speed and the way Metcalf’s Law explains the increasing value of networks as they grow, he was as well looking at Reed’s Law, a lesser-known axiom that describes the exponential growth of sub-groups. Again, Ning has only been a modest success, nevertheless his idea has been borne out in Facebook and Groupon, both companies he has invested in and sits on the boards of.

5. “Software Will Eat the World”In his role as a venture capitalist, Andreessen looks for companies that are transforming different sectors of the economy through computing. He is participating, on the one hand, in the process of “creative destruction,”by funding disruptive companies. Nevertheless he is guided, as in all his ventures, by an optimism in our capacity for rapid technology. As he says in his conclusion to the interview with Anderson, “The at that time what is whatever we invent straightway.”

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Content strategist

I am a content strategist, designer and developer. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. Together I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile innovation. I live nearly the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and I cover the creative economy in Portland as the editor of liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.