I used to be a bit snotty about Marc Andreessen, but over the years my respect for him has grown and his blog is now on my must read list. As an example of my misplaced snottiness read this from “Understanding Hypermedia 2.000”, 1997, page 31:
“Marc Andreesen (sic) may not be as much of a visionary as the other hypermedia innovators, but his importance in the development of hypermedia should not be underestimated. The success of Mosaic in attracting both users and providers of information to the Web would have been sufficient to guarantee him an important role in its history. In the long term, his role in founding Netscape may be even more significant. Its rapid appearance as a multi-billion corporation marks a point when hypermedia moved from being an interesting curiosity to a medium whose implications were being taken very seriously by decision makers at the highest level in government, industry and business.”
So apologies to Marc – in the unlikely event of a new, revised publication of “Understanding Hypermedia”, your entry will be very different. Anyone who can write the following lies very high in my admiration:
“One of my favorite TATWTESBTISBAs — Truths About The World That Everyone Should Be Taught In School But Aren’t — is that the real world is a wildly unpredictable place, and that most interesting or important things that happen aren’t predictable, because there are simply too many moving parts and unknown factors at play.”