Netscape Was Worth $3 Billion in One Day. Then Microsoft Gave Its Browser Away for Free.

On the morning of August 9th, 1995, a company that had never made a profit opened its stock at $28 a share. Within an hour it hit $75. By lunch, one of its 24-year-old founders was worth over $58 million on paper. Wall Street had a name for days like that: the Netscape moment. This is how the company that built the modern web browser lost a war it started winning by 90%, and how the code it gave away for free quietly outlived it by a decade. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:38 The Browser Nobody Asked For 1:44 The Company Built in Five Months 2:55 The Name Nobody Owned 3:31 The Fastest Growing Application in History 4:30 August Ninth 5:25 The Sleeping Giant Wakes Up 6:35 The Meeting That Became a Lawsuit 7:20 Bundling 8:18 The Bleed 9:00 One Last Gamble 9:39 The Sale 10:16 The Verdict 11:11 The Long Goodbye 12:01 The Resurrection Nobody Named Netscape Sources: Wikipedia articles on Netscape, Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark, Jim Barksdale, the United States v. Microsoft antitrust case, and the reports they cite. Where accounts differ, they are described as accounts. Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons (public domain unless listed) and public event photography. #TechHistory #Netscape #BrowserWars #Microsoft #BusinessHistory