Aol Guru Preaches Simplicity
One of the computer industry’s brighter lights had a strong message when he preached to a mostly techie choir recently: Make it simple. Build what consumers want.
The sermon from the podium was by Marc Andreessen, the chief technology officer for America Online.
His “church” was New York’s spacious Javits Convention Center, which comfortably housed the three-day PC Expo convention congregation of 10,000.
To hear Andreessen, a good share of the crowd briefly left the glitz and clamor and carnival atmosphere of the exhibit hall (“get your free software here!”) where more than 550 vendors displayed enough new products to fill 13 pages of the program guide.
But Andreessen, who in 1994 helped found Netscape, said the next computer challenge is “getting away from a technology-focused industry to what people really want to do in their lives.”
PCs have only reached 3-4 percent of the people in the world, he said. And the Internet - though it reaches 200 million people worldwide, including one-quarter to one-third of all U.S. households - still only has 2 percent global penetration.
“Technology could never drive this total close to 100 percent of the population, but Internet applications can,” Andreessen said.
“We need a real shift from building the next new technology to building a mass market consumer application or product,” he said.
“Consumers just don’t care what (computer processing) chip is in their toaster or microwave, or the specs on their computers. They don’t want the specs on their soft drinks - they just want Coke or Pepsi.”
Andreessen said there is “tremendous power in branding,” noting that, “despite the best efforts the last 10 years to kill Apple (computers) - by its own management - the brand endures.
“Consumers are not systems integrators,” he said. “They want something that is completely push-button or point-and-click.”
He said, “The Internet is `convenience in a box,’ with `killer apps’ (applications) like e-mail, the Web and instant messaging.”
Andreessen, retelling an old industry joke, said, “If cars were developed by computer engineers, they would get 4,000 miles per gallon, cost less than $500 - and blow up once a week.”
He added: “Steering would be under a pop-up menu and you would have to hold down buttons on the radio and air conditioner at the same time to change gears.”
Though AOL users have increased from an average of 14 minutes a night to 55, Andreessen said, “It’s a war against TV for minutes at the end of the day.
“Consumers really take TV seriously. Surveys show the only thing respondents ranked higher (for daily frequency) was brushing their teeth. So we better make this as easy as TV to use.
“IMac (by Apple) is the model,” he said. “The consumer says he wants to buy one and the only question is `what color?’
“We need to make the hard things to do very simple.” The resounding applause of the congregation seemed to indicate genuine agreement.
Andreessen asides:
“A few years ago the user profile on the Internet was 50 percent men and 50 percent men pretending to be women. Now, 53 percent of the users on AOL are women.”
“The Internet and Web will be the deciding factor in the presidential election, if not in 2000, then certainly in 2004 - much like the televised debates between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were a deciding factor in 1960.
”(Republican candidate) George W. Bush has bought up every URL (Web address) with the name Bush in it that he could, including Bushsucks.com.”
” `You’ve Got Mail’ ” - in which booksellers Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan courted via AOL e-mail - “I think we’ll all agree is the best movie ever made. (To much laughter.) It’s a scandal that it didn’t get an Oscar.” Andreessen added, however, that the film was “not quite realistic.
“If Tom Hanks had spent that much time snuggling up to Meg Ryan and not running his chain of bookstores, Amazon.com would have put him out of business.”