[unreal37]

I think there is a point in the original article that is perhaps overstated but nonetheless mainly true - Andreessen is being hailed as one of the great entrepreneurs of our time by Wired. But really, his main skill is building companies that don't make much money and selling them to other companies. He has never really created anything of long-term value. He's no Warren Buffet or Bill Gates.

[jmj42]

> He has never really created anything of long-term value

Except HP Server Automation[1], HP Operations Orchestration[2], HP Network Automation[3], and that's just Opsware products. That doesn't touch on the lasting transformational aspects of his work at UIUC, or Netscape.

[1] http://www8.hp.com/emea_middle_east/en/software/software-pro... [2] http://www8.hp.com/emea_middle_east/en/software/software-pro... [3] http://www8.hp.com/emea_middle_east/en/software/software-pro...

[dredmorbius]

Opsware is a freaking joke.

[jmj42]

Do mind elaborating?

In fact, Opsware created products that (still) play an important role in large, private, datacenters. Hell, for what it's worth, their 3 main products were actually created to manage their own infrastructure. Which part of that is the joke?

[dredmorbius]

The deployment attempts I've seen have been spectacular failures. This goes back a few years (~2008), some things may have changed.

Lack of a CLI accessible on managed nodes being a huge issue for datacenter work.

Staggeringly deficient database performance.

My recent experience has been with Puppet/Chef. They're still crufty in their own ways, but far more appropriate than Oopsware.

[pedalpete]

> He has never really created anything of long-term value

if the question is 'value' vs 'dollars'. Netscape was the enabler to the creation of trillions of dollars. That's value. He saw the opportunity and created it.

I don't think he needs to be an innovator to be a VC. He needs to be smart and recognize opportunities when they come to him. He's shown a knack for that.

[jaylevitt]

And as for " I’ve never met anybody who thought that Netscape was a good acquisition for AOL": Netscape could have been a great acquisition for AOL if we had any idea how to properly acquire a company. It brought years of true, native Internet experience at a time when we were just starting to transition away from being a proprietary thick client.

Sadly, we made the classic mistake: Let's acquire this brilliant team that works well together, and then let's split up the team and sprinkle the individuals around our existing organization in the hope they'll influence our old-school thinking.

That's like trying to get a vaccination from a homeopath.

[ma2rten]

And why is this a bad thing? I don't see why it makes a difference if the company continues to exist on it's own or as part of another company.

[wmf]

True. I think the point is more that these companies made no profits while they were independent and then continued to make no profits after they were acquired; thus in retrospect the acquirers must have overpaid.

[ma2rten]

Except that this line of reasoning assumes that the people who run the acquiring company are morons. This is quite a strong assumption to make without any further evidence. I think neither of us knows enough about HP's fiances to make that claim (I presume you were talking about Opsware).

[gaius]

Because it's a zero-sum game.