INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Mr. Caiazzi, you have been in Netscape from the beginning. Can you tell us about this
company and the role it has acquired on the Internet?
Answer
The company began with Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. Most people know of Jim
Clark because he founded Silicon Graphics, the workstation company well-known for special
effects in Hollywood movies.Marc Andreessen was a graduate student at the University of
Illinois, and they worked on a project that was really hyper media, together with CERN,
which is responsible for much of the Internet protocols. This project really created the
explosion on the Internet. Before the WWW, which is the graphic part of the Internet,
there was e-mail, and it was file transfer. But once they put images and sounds on the
Internet and created an easy way to access these sounds and images in a very user-friendly
way, much like the Macintosh, it became very popular and it began to grow with this 100
percent number of site increases, 100 percent number of clients accessing the Internet
every, say, four months. This was really the explosion.
Question 2
How many copies of Netscape have been distributed and sold in the world?
Answer
I don’t know exactly how many we’ve sold, but in terms of distribution
there’s been 45 million. It’s now the most popular personal computer
application. This is of course due to the big interest in the Internet, but the other
thing special about Netscape is it’s everywhere. We even put Netscape on Linux, which
has a very big following in Europe and in the US with computer hobbyists. It’s a free
version of an operating system.
Question 3
What about the browser war? This summer Bill Gates started strong competition with
Netscape. What has happened since then?
Answer
We feel the browser war is over. We haven’t lost any market share with
the new introduction of the Microsoft products. We keep upgrading at a very fast rate.
They haven’t been able to keep up. Our features are coming out faster. They’re
always made on all platforms, not just on Microsoft. We include UNIX, we include
Macintosh, we include Linux. We’ve lost no market share. They try very hard.
They’re a very good competitor but we’ve won that war and we’re now
switching our focus to instead of just being the Internet company, which people think of
us as, we’re marketing ourselves as an Intranet company. And the focus is a little
bit different. What are the needs of businesses, what are enterprises needs, such as
directory services, certificate services? This is our future, and this something that
nobody else is doing.
Question 4
Can you explain the concept of Intranet and what kind of product Netscape will deliver for
this user?
Answer
The Intranet really to some extent already exists. Companies, especially the large
multinationals, already have an information infrastructure for billing, for keeping track
of sales information, for keeping track of inventory. These electronic systems exist. Now,
what we’re doing is we’re making the communication among the different systems
easier. So there might be a network of mainframes, and a different disjoint network of
personal computers, and there might be Novell computers, Macintoshes. What we’re
doing now is creating a platform for all of this information to be distributed with a
common user interface. The user interface is the Netscape communicator, which you could
say is the next generation of the navigator. It includes much more functionality. The
types of services that this will include are things like directory services, certificate
services, calendaring services for scheduling appointments, but this is going to be done,
again, on a multi-platform basis, so that regardless of whether you have an application on
a mainframe, a UNIX workstation, an NT personal computer or a Macintosh, these will all
integrate and you’ll have the same interface and that’s what we’re doing
that’s very new. Some of this functionality already exists but it only exists in a
proprietary way. So we’re opening it up and that’s really what the Intranet is
all about. The Intranet is bringing the protocols and the servers and the applications of
the Internet which have done so well in making the Internet this fantastic place to
communicate with people from different countries, people even with different languages.
This is what brings us together. This is what will bring corporations together to increase
their productivity.
Question 5
A new language, Java, was created to be used with all kinds of platforms. What is the
relationship between Netscape and Sun, the company that makes Java?
Answer
Netscape and Sun are very close partners. Sun licenses their Java technology. Java is a
network object-oriented language, so it is a fantastic language for the Internet.
It’s network-based so you can build applications that will run on the network. The
key here is that the application does not reside on a PC. That’s why there’s all
this talk now about the network computer, the NC. This NC, frankly, doesn’t need to
have an operating system. It doesn’t need to have a Windows 95 or a Mac interface.
All it has is a navigator or the Netscape communicator, the next generation. And this will
download programs when it needs them and only when it needs them. It does this in what we
call a just-in-time basis. So if you want to write a document on a word processor like
Microsoft Word, if there is a Java applet that can do that function, then it’s
downloaded from the network in real time and it’s run. And this is a big savings
because there’s no maintaining software because the software is maintained in one
location for all users. So this is really the strength of Java, the fact that the programs
- what you actually run - are delivered just in time. Now, in terms of our relationship
with Sun, again, we’re talking free licensing. It is a very close relationship
between the two because philosophically we’re the same. We’re pushing open
standards, they’re pushing Java, which is a language they invented, and they’re
licensing it for free and they want it to be the standard on the Internet. I think we see
today that’s already the case. There are a lot of Java applets which began to run
with Netscape Navigator Version 2.
Question 6
What’s the next generation of the Netscape Communicator like and what other programs
does Netscape have for the network computers?
Answer
The Communicator is our next generation of universal client. It is universal in that it
can run anywhere, on Linux, it runs on Macintosh, Windows 95, Windows 3.1 and UNIX. So
it’s universal and it’s what you as an end user would actually work with.
It’s your interface either into your corporation - the Intranet - or the Internet.
The various modules that it contains are the old Navigator, which would be the WWW; it
includes e-mail, which will also have cryptography built in so you can have secure
messages. It’s a open standard. S-MIME. It will also have news or collaboration, the
next generation of NNTP or Internet news. It’s also going to include calendaring and
scheduling for making appointments and reserving rooms or resources. It will also include
a directory service component so that you can find various things like somebody’s
address on the Internet or within a corporation you can find their public key to send
cryptographic messages to them. This is the next generation. Of course, the other
component that it includes, which is a very important distinguishing feature against
Microsoft, is what we call the Gold Component. And this is where we can edit HTML
documents, edit these rich content documents within the navigator or within the next
generation communicator. So you have one tool on your desktop which does everything: mail,
collaboration, directory services, calendaring and scheduling, and WWW.
Question 7
Larry Ellison in a recent conference said that in the near future there will be more need
for the browser, the browser will become transparent. How will the design of the browser
change in your opinion?
Answer
Well, we might see things a little differently than Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is the
president of Oracle Corporation which is a provider of data bases. They’re really
concerned with servers and in particularly data base servers. His ideal world is where
there are a number of servers which run big Oracle data bases filled with images and
texts, and you use all the Oracle tools to access them. You might be accessing the data
through Netscape Navigator. It would be possible. So he thinks that the navigator or the
client is the least important part because he wants his data base centralised. We see that
in this new distributed world, this new network paradigm, there may be many smaller
servers or medium-sized servers, some old mainframe servers and then, of course, clients.
It’s going to include all components. I don’t think our vision is going to
change to fit that of Larry Ellison. But clearly our Netscape Navigator is going to
continue in the direction that we’re going, which is to focus on Intranets, to focus
on enterprise needs, the calendaring, the scheduling, all the things that corporations do
today but they have to do with a proprietary platform. They have to decide on an operating
system and then from that operating system they are given the services. What we’re
doing is we’re making these services one layer higher on the technology level, so
it’s at the network layer not at the server or client layer.
Question 8
There are two new directions in Internet. One is towards electronic commerce and the other
is towards entertainment because there will the possibility to have Internet on TV. How is
Netscape preparing for this?
Answer
In fact, within the past year Netscape has started up a new company called Actra. Actra is
our electronic commerce company. So Netscape is very much focused on the Intranet, the
corporate Internet. Actra, on the other hand, is going to have business-to-business
electronic transactions like EDI, electronic data interchange. This company will handle
that. That’ll be one component. The other component is what were originally called by
Netscape the commercial applications or the Internet applications. This is where, for
example, you could sell a Wall Street Journal subscription or a New York Times
subscription or a La Repubblica subscription on-line, receive payment on-line and all of
these users could be maintained in a very user-friendly way. Again, the system manager or
the person who runs these services uses the navigator, they’re behind the firewall so
they’re protected, all their transactions are protected. And then you have the users,
the accessors of this information on the Internet who could be from anywhere in the world.
And they can make a secure transaction for payment. So Netscape already has three
commercial applications called the publishing system, the merchant system and the
community system. The publishing system is used for the Wall Street Journal, the New York
Times, the Los Angeles Times, and it’s used with customers in Europe like Sweden
Post. These customers of ours, these partners of ours, they accept payment on-line. And
using our cryptographic standards of SSL, they’re sure that this information is
passed securely, that some hacker won’t be able to access this information.
Transactions are stored behind the firewall. The merchant system is a catalogue system, a
way of displaying catalogue pages or magazine pages. And if there’s a product that
you want to purchase, that you’re happy with, you select various attributes like the
colour, the size of a suit or a tie and you could order that on-line and, again, give the
payment information. This is also a very popular product. It’s used by MCI, the phone
company in America. It’s also used by our largest catalogue company in the US called
J.C.Penny. It’s used in Europe quite extensively. ICL had a project with Barclays
Bank. We had the project with Sweden Post and they host the largest catalogue of
Scandinavia. So these are really popular products. It is a way for us to really jump-start
this market because it’s a new market and applications didn’t exist, so these
are applications that people can install on their systems and begin electronic commerce
immediately.
Question 9
And what are your projects in Italy?
Answer
We’ll be announcing projects in Italy very soon. One of the reasons in fact that
I’m here is to work with some of our partners, given the fact that I’ve worked
with our initial clients in the US in building their electronic commerce. But
announcements will be made very soon; I’m not able to tell you now. Netscape now has
a local presence in Italy. The office was opened in Milan, the country president and
our partners gave a press release on the 17th of October, and we’re going to be very
strong in Italy.
Question 10
Jim Clark, the founder of Netscape, has opened a new company called Navio. What can you
say about this?
Answer
Navio’s mission is a little bit different than Netscape. They want to make sure that
the navigator will be adopted and will be ready for all future generations of devices.
This will include television, and small, hand-held devices like the new Nokia phone, which
also has Internet access build into it. It will be for these unusual devices that
don’t necessarily have a market share yet but are really the emerging technologies,
things like web TV, the NC computer, the smaller devices like the Nokia phone. We’re
going to make sure that the navigator or the next generation, which we call the
communicator, can work anywhere, everywhere.
Question 11
What’s your vision? How long will this new technology take to spread?
Answer
That will again depend on these partners who are developing the devices. We’re
starting to see a lot of activity in the NC computer market. Oracle has got a very strong
initiative there. And there are other companies in Japan that have very strong
initiatives, so we’re going to be working closely with these companies. Sun
Microsystems also has a very strong initiative for the NC computer. I think within a year
the NC computer we might see some movement into the Intranet. I think that will be the
first market. It will not be the mass market. It won’t be the recreational user, but
it will be within a corporate or a enterprise network.
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