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activity. Leveraging Marc's skills, NCSA pushed Mosaic hard, from being a great idea seen in Viola to a must-have product that was going to be on every desktop. Andreessen and Clark set out aggressively to conquer the entire market. To do so they used an unprecedented marketing policy: They released their product for free, so it would be picked up widely and quickly; all someone had to do was download it from the Internet. They also seemed to follow the unprecedented financial policy of not having a business plan at first: they decided not to bother to figure out what the plan would be until the product was world famous and omnipotent.

The arrival of Web software and services as a commercial product was a very important step for the Web. Many people would not really want to use the Web unless they could be sure they could buy the products they needed from a company with all the usual divisions, including customer support. Robert and I had spent so much time trying to persuade companies to take on the Web as a product. At last, it had happened.

People began to ask me whether I was planning to start a company. Behind that question, maybe they were wondering if I felt the rug had been swept out from beneath my feet by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. Of course, I had several options apart from starting a consortium. I had actually thought about starting a company with the working name Websoft, to do much the same as Netscape. (The name was later taken by a real company.) But at this point, starting a company was by no means a guarantee of future riches. It was a financial risk like any startup, and a considerable one in this case, since there was not even a clear market yet.

Furthermore, my primary mission was to make sure that the Web I had created continued to evolve. There were still many things that could have gone wrong. It could have faded away, been replaced by a different system, have fragmented, or changed its nature so that it ceased to exist as a universal