__ Netscape's marketing bruiser is leading the company's must-win push to become a portal powerhouse. The Homerphobic consensus is that he's impatient, loutish, pugnacious, insensitive. And brilliant. Would you stake your company's future on a guy like this? __
People asked to describe Mike Homer start with adjectives and end with exclamation points. Smart! Aggressive! Hard-working! Honest! Loyal! Tenacious! Mercurial! Rough! Obnoxious! Egotistical! Overrated! Intimidating! Angry! All agree that Homer - onetime Apple wunderkind, last man standing at pen-computing start-up GO, Netscape marketing veteran, and media neophyte now orchestrating Netscape's media future - is a real piece of work. He's Silicon Valley's All-American cyberboy hothead, provoking extreme reactions wherever he goes. At a Netscape strategy presentation earlier this year, a reporter who covers the company delivered the classic outburst of Homerphobic hyperbole: "You look at him cross-eyed, he's liable to pull out a gun and shoot you."
Mike Homer, executive vice president and general manager of Netscape's Web site, Netcenter, offers his own favorite adjective in an exclamatory pass at personal revelation.
"I'm really direct!" he says. "Not in a way that has anything to do with personal issues, because I'm accepting of all alternative life-forms." His problem, he says, is that he doesn't like to waste time with the schmooze. "I'm not like what I think we have a lot of in Silicon Valley - a lot of people running around networking and talking about the universe and that sort of thing." But wait. There's more.
"First of all, I don't get that angry - I get excited. I raise my voice a little bit. Some people think that's yelling, but it's not - I'm just getting excited!" And besides, he and some of his friends suggest, the titans of the tech world - Andy Grove and Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs - well, they're famous spleen venters. If Homer lacks their accomplishments, what's wrong with being a disciple of their method? "I subscribe to the paranoia school of management - like Intel, Microsoft. You've got to have this sense of controlled paranoia." Not too paranoid, of course, since Homer also claims a role as Netscape's class clown. "I'm a wiseass by nature. People that don't know me probably don't see that that much. I'm laughing all day long - mostly at myself. I'm totally into self-deprecating humor. Our industry people take this stuff so seriously, and really, it's only just computers. It's not that big a deal!"
Jumping from paranoia to punch lines like a Net company changing business models, Homer has become an industry celebrity. He's a peer of such online moguls as Excite's George Bell, CNET's Halsey Minor, and Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang - if still a step or two below the perches of Gates and Grove. And therein lies the problem, for some. Gatesian behavior wears thin when unaccompanied by Gatesian achievement. But when people talk about Mike Homer, it's personality, not accomplishments, that they turn to again and again. In a subculture that prizes innovation and genius above all else, Mike Homer's greatest achievement may be having built a career simply on being Mike Homer.
Print can't capture the full fury of this 40-year-old, heavyset, 5-foot, 8-inch, half Irish, half Greek son of San Francisco's blue-collar Catholic community when he goes on a tirade. Words on a page can't convey the sharpness of his high-pitched, nasal sneering. Nor can they transmit the sparks thrown off when Mike Homer's fuse is lit.
Describing such incidents, some former Homer employees can sound like members of a codependency-recovery group. One recalls a brutal tongue-lashing in a meeting with Homer and two colleagues to discuss Netscape's In-Box Direct program. "Mike walked in and reamed out every one of us, one by one," the witness recalls. When a fourth member of the group arrived several minutes later, Homer interrupted himself to deliver an equally scathing critique of the new arrival's efforts.
"Mike is legendary inside Netscape for his terrible personal behavior and for the way he treated people badly," says Todd Rulon-Miller, the former Netscape sales chief who left the company in 1997 after Barksdale promoted Homer over him. The stories are widespread enough inside the company that behind Homer's back, the more credential-obsessed employees in Netscape's enterprise division, those who attended élite MBA programs at Stanford and Harvard, are said to joke that he graduated from the Drill Sergeant School of Business.
But in addition to the jokes, there has been serious discussion among Netscape executives about Homer's negative effect on morale. "It's one of these things where, when you start to hurt the self-esteem of the individual, are you going to get performance out of them?" says Ram Shriram, another former Netscape manager who had a front-row seat for numerous Homer blow-ups. Shriram, the president of Internet commerce start-up and Amazon.com subsidiary Junglee, calls Homer "very brilliant" but "mercurial."
Barbara Gore, president of consulting firm The BizDev Group, is among those now sounding codependent no more. "Let me tell you - I have made presentations to CEOs and senior executives from Fortune 100 companies, and the only time I've ever had butterflies in my stomach was in a meeting with Mike Homer," says Gore, who worked for Homer as the original publisher of the Netscape Web site before it was relabeled Netcenter. "He's incredibly smart and incredibly analytical, and he wants you to be the same way," she adds. "The worst thing you can say to him in a meeting is, 'I don't know.' He'll just destroy you."
Of course, one person's tale of emotional abuse is another's testimonial to tough love. Or so say Homer's fans: the mentors, who include some of the most-connected people in the Valley, and the loyal lieutenants who have re-upped in his squad during the long march from Apple to GO to Netscape. They see his "rough edges" as a side effect of his extraordinarily high standards, something that weak-kneed detractors just don't get. No one, they say, works harder or is more loyal. "People are willing to suffer the dogmatism and the dismissiveness because they see the good side," says Randy Komisar, former president of LucasArts Entertainment Company and "virtual CEO" of WebTV Networks, who worked with Homer at both Apple and GO. To understand Homer's flaws, Komisar explains, "you need to take his strengths and extend them."
"He has such pride - he sees stuff that other people don't see," explains Bill Campbell. Campbell, the Intuit chair and a new Netscape board member, has known Homer since the early '80s at Apple, when he ran sales and marketing and Homer was a precocious tyro programming IBM systems to manage Apple's distribution systems. Campbell would later become Homer's boss at GO, and the two have a nearly familial bond - Campbell was best man at Homer's wedding last summer. The duo make an annual baseball trip with Campbell's teenage son; this July, they took in games at Boston's Fenway Park and New York's Shea Stadium.
With paternal fervor, Campbell suggests that along with Homer's pride and passion "come a couple of things that drive people nuts.... He can't wait, and he tries to do things himself." Campbell says that in recent years, Homer has begun to "tone down" his more extreme behavior.
But a toned-down Homer is still a handful. Jennifer Bailey is a Homer loyalist - she worked for him at Apple and GO before joining Netscape - and she says she long ago learned to read Homer's moods and tiptoe around him when necessary. "I think the key," says Bailey, now a senior vice president of strategic development and marketing at Netcenter, "has been to understand when he's like that, and to say, 'I can always come back to him later.'"
Homer's volatility exists side by side with a second trait: In an industry storied for its stamina, he has a nearly machinelike ability to plow endlessly, relentlessly forward. "The hardest-working guy I know," says Danny Shader, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins who worked for Homer at Netscape. "A 100-miles-an-hour guy who works morning, noon, and night," adds Campbell, who after a stint as president of Claris Corporation took Homer and other Apple refugees to the Kleiner Perkins-funded GO.
There, according to Jerry Kaplan's Startup, Homer's iron-man act was matched by an unwillingness to ever call retreat - even when the cause looked lost to others. In the early '90s at GO, AT&T aborted a long-expected round of funding. The senior managers in the cash-starved start-up, including Campbell, Komisar, and cofounders Kaplan and Robert Carr, felt betrayed by AT&T. They walked away. Not Homer. He stayed with GO as its operations were merged into EO, AT&T's own pen-computing subsidiary. He gave up his marketing title to become vice president of engineering, even when everyone around him knew that the effort was doomed. Homer, wrote Kaplan, felt "that at least one of us should see things through until the next version of the product was shipped."
"He's an athlete - he's a business athlete, which is funny when you look at him," says Komisar. "And I think the EO example shows that even when the writing's on the wall, he still fights." The payoff for Homer's intense dedication to GO would come a few years later, when John Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins partner who had led his firm's GO investment, introduced Homer to Netscape.
Ask Homer supporters to explain where all that intensity comes from, and they will mention his roots in a San Francisco community known for its mix of insularity and industry, pride and defensiveness. The story of his blue-collar youth and the values he inherited is so well known to his friends that they relate it in eerily similar terms during a series of separate conversations.
The narrative features stops in working-class neighborhoods (the Mission, Glen Park); a dad who was a tavernkeeper and baseball player with disappointed pro ambitions; a mom who worked outside the home at a time when Carol Brady was America's model woman; schooling by nuns (grammar school at Mission Dolores) and Jesuits (he was the only kid in his class to go on to Saint Ignatius, San Francisco's élite Catholic high school); and an early focus on a serious work ethic and making his own way.
Mike, says his sister Sue, had "a good relationship" with their father Jimmy, "especially around sports." But while Homer says he was a good-hitting shortstop in high school, when he turned 16 he dropped baseball to work in a grocery. He found that earning money for a car and for school was more important to him than playing ball: "I worked lots of hours. I paid for all my own stuff. I paid for my own college, and I paid for my sister's college."
Jimmy Homer, says his son, was "an honest workingman" who instilled respect for the truth. "You know, if I lied, he would - well, he never really beat the shit out of me. I mean, you say 'beat the shit out of you' today, that means that he put you in the hospital. Then, it meant that he'd give you a really bad spanking."
Be honest. Be direct. Or else.
From Saint Ignatius, Homer went on to San Francisco State University. "I did well at school, but I was sort of an underachiever. I was pretty bored a lot of the time," he remembers. Although he cut most classes, he found himself drawn to a computer-programming course. After a transfer to UC Berkeley, he indulged his geek tendencies while majoring in business. That led to a job programming IBM systems and eventually to Apple, a customer of the small company where he worked.
His performance attracted attention, and in 1984, at age 26, his career took off almost by accident. The company's new chief, John Sculley, was looking for a full-time technology tutor. "One day they said, 'Hey, you wanna go to work for John Sculley and teach him about computers and architecture and all that?' Like, out of the blue," says Homer, still sounding surprised. "So I became this guy to help with all that, and it ranged over everything from helping him with the computer to [answering questions like] 'Well, how does it work inside?' 'How do you hook it up to an IBM?' and 'What should our product strategy be for that?'"
He started dating Sculley's daughter Laura, which allowed his management training to continue outside the office. "He would come over to our house to take her out on a date, and she would get annoyed because we'd end up sitting on the couch talking about technology and new products," recalls an amused Sculley.
Homer arrived in Sculley's office at a pivotal moment in Apple history - the 10 months Homer spent in the job were the months leading up to the struggle between Jobs and Sculley and Jobs's bitter departure. Homer points to that experience, and a subsequent battle over licensing the Macintosh operating system, as key lessons in front-office politics.
Homer remembers that he and Komisar spent 12 months in 1986 and 1987 researching and negotiating a deal with workstation maker Apollo for use of the Mac OS. Finally, only Sculley's OK stood between them and a pact that would have set the stage for a new distribution model for the company's flagship product. The war between antilicensing forces, led by Jean-Louis Gassée, and licensing advocates, like Campbell, culminated in a showdown in Apple's executive committee. Entering the session, Homer believed Sculley and another key player, Apple International chief Michael Spindler, backed the proposal - which would mean an agreement was in the bag. But the deal Homer and Komisar put forward was defeated, 5-4, after Sculley abstained and Spindler voted with Gassée. "We kind of had the sights all lined up, right? What shocked us, frankly, was Sculley didn't vote. And Spindler voted against it; I don't know what got into him. It's amazing - 'cause he was all for it prior to then," Homer says.
He emerged "totally disillusioned" with the lack of integrity in corporate life.
"I was 10 feet away from Sculley," Homer recalls. "Well, I'm looking at all of this going on, going, 'What is with this? These people don't treat each other like humans. They're not honest. They're not direct.' These are all values I had growing up. So all of a sudden I go from having never met a VP - literally, I had never met a VP when they came looking for me to do this job for Sculley - and now I'm sitting next to the CEO and I'm watching all these guys. And I just got totally disillusioned with it! And I said, 'Man, if I get to do one of these jobs, I'm never going to be like these guys!' ... Boy, I just learned a lot about doing all that stuff."
Maybe too much, say some of Homer's critics. His career, they say, is marked by a penchant for getting close to power and staying there.
"Look at Mike's history, which was developing a special relationship with John Sculley, and then a special relationship with Bill Campbell," says a former Netscape executive who claims Homer's political elbows are razor sharp. "Over the years [at Netscape], Mike developed a special relationship with Jim Barksdale. There's no question that his management tendencies, his behavior, and his style are such that it's a very stealth and subtle game with him. Let's say I'm fighting him, or he's fighting me, and we get to the finish line. And he's successfully eroded away all of my support. So he can put up his hands and say, 'Who, me?'"
For an example, say several former Netscape insiders, look no further than Homer's tussle with Todd Rulon-Miller, the firm's former senior vice president of worldwide sales, service, and support.
In the fourth quarter of 1996, Netscape's revenue growth began to slow as Microsoft stepped up its free-browser blitz. "It was the first quarter where our quarter-to-quarter growth was under 20 percent," Rulon-Miller says. Concerned about competing with the sales armies deployed by competitors like Lotus (then a division of IBM) and Microsoft in the battle for the enterprise software business, Rulon-Miller says he lobbied Netscape CFO Peter Currie for more troops in the field. A series of meetings including Currie, Barksdale, Homer, and Rulon-Miller tried to resolve what Rulon-Miller calls the "resource squabbles" between the increasingly divided sales and marketing groups.
By the summer of 1997, the conflict had yet to be settled. But the business was still in trouble, with the company failing to achieve its internal-revenue target for three straight quarters. Pressure was growing for Barksdale to merge the sales and marketing staffs to help turn around the situation. But under whose leadership?
"It was actually kind of simple," says Homer about the dispute. "The truth of the matter is that ... sales and marketing disagreed on the goals and the strategy. The other simple fact is that when you miss your internal targets three quarters in a row, something has to change. Todd lobbied Jim to run the combined entity. Todd believed we should invest much more money in the direct sales force.... I wanted only to invest in things that were going to directly generate revenue." He rejects suggestions that the struggle with Rulon-Miller had turned personal: "People overplay the personality stuff. I was not lobbying for the organizations to be put together myself. That's not what I wanted to do. But we seemed to get to a point where that was needed."
"We finished our [second] quarter," says Rulon-Miller. "I was in Europe for a week or 10 days at the beginning of the third quarter, and I got an urgent message that [Barksdale] wanted to meet with me. He was very businesslike ... and he said he wanted Mike Homer to run sales and marketing. I didn't feel shocked or clotheslined by this - the lines had been drawn in the previous three years." After a few weeks, Rulon-Miller decided to leave.
But if Homer enjoyed the victory, he didn't get to savor it. His tenure as sales chief ended after only two-plus quarters, when Barksdale decided to temporarily assume the sales and marketing post himself and move Homer to Netcenter. (Sales responsibility was transferred again with the August 1998 hiring of Oracle's Barry Ariko as Netscape's chief operating officer.) Homer's sales track record: The company's 1997 third quarter - already under way when he took over - followed the form of the preceding year, with a smallish quarter-to-quarter percentage gain in revenue to US$152 million (up from $135 million in Q2). But then Netscape experienced its first revenue decline: Fourth-quarter '97 revenue plunged to $125 million. That performance disturbed Wall Street analysts, though Homer says he had warned Barksdale that the decline was possible.
"Here's what I think I did," explains Homer about his brief, unspectacular tenure as head of sales. "I managed to restructure the operation so that it was ready for what we needed to do. And unfortunately, that was a long process, and there was no way to get it done in a quarter or two. I said to Barksdale, 'I don't think you're really going to see results from this until Q1 or Q2 of next year.'"
As for Rulon-Miller, he looks back at the three years he spent working with Homer and grudgingly concedes that "on the question of what are his attributes, he's really a brilliant guy, he's very smart.... He's got a very developed sense of marketing from his Apple days. But it's very niche, retail-marketing oriented - you know, $99.99 specials. And that didn't help me with selling $5,000 servers.... Mike would put a string of tactically smart decisions together, and say, 'Look at this!' But that's not strategy."
When Barksdale unveiled the new Netcenter program last winter, his company was looking for a shot in the arm financially, strategically, and psychically. Homer says he and the other Netscape execs predicted, when they sought a mezzanine financing round from strategic partners before the company's IPO, that Microsoft would undercut their browser business by giving away Internet Explorer. "If you read the first prospectus - I mean, I wrote it, right? - the C-round prospectus in March of '95, it's right there: 'Microsoft will give away the browser for free.' We all knew that. It's just a question of when that would really affect us and how it would affect us."
Forewarned, as it happened, was not forearmed: During the more than two years that followed that prediction, Netscape traveled an erratic strategic course. "We've gone from being the browser company to being the server company to being the intranet company to being the extranet company to being the ecommerce and Netcenter company," Jennifer Bailey sums up.
Homer's contribution to that "strategic" evolution, at least from Bailey's perspective, has been promoting the Netscape brand and "getting in there and understanding where are our weaknesses, where are our strengths, and then being able to understand how we move ourselves strategically." But the examples of Homer's strategic insights offered by Netscape's senior executives tend to underwhelm. Company cofounder Marc Andreessen points to Homer's authorship of the 1995 mezzanine prospectus as a key contribution. Asked via email about Homer's influence on corporate strategy, Barksdale writes back, "One of the early 'Homer marketing' ideas was the bundling of our server products under SuiteSpot branding, and it has worked extremely well."
Others say that what Homer contributed most was a frenzied attitude and pace (the vaunted "Netscape time") that could actually work against the company's best interests. "Sometimes the risk of one two-hour session was that a new strategy would get rolled out across the globe," says Ram Shriram, who recalls Homer's Jobs-like ability to sound convincing in the moment. "He can kind of make shit up on the fly, and even if it isn't right, it sounds right. Mike has his own reality-distortion field."
"While we ended up saying we had, and then executing, products that were open and faster and more scalable," says Rulon-Miller, "the fact of the matter was that when we called on companies, Netscape was bringing in maybe an engineer and a sales guy against 40 sales managers from IBM. In enterprise or corporate selling, it's not the best product that wins." Instead, it's the company that can provide the most support, as even Microsoft has learned in its NT sales effort. Meanwhile, says Rulon-Miller, "we did a couple of things: We really antagonized Lotus; that turned into personal antagonism. Andreessen would get aggressive in the press, and [Lotus president] Jeff Papows would get offended and fire back. This is where a Mike Homer in marketing, who wasn't known for humility, would stoke the fire.... Microsoft, we picked up the rock from day one and hit them in the eyeball.... We didn't go in stealthily to try to steal business from these guys - we went in with loudspeakers blaring."
Netscape's troubled move into the enterprise business, of course, came at the expense of other priorities - particularly the Netscape site, which was once the biggest traffic center on the Web. In the ongoing battle for resources, Homer says, he was "the biggest Netcenter champion on the planet." He says he told Barksdale, "'Jim, we can mint money. This is beautiful! Give me more!'" But when the company decided to devote its early resources elsewhere, he went along.
"The dynamics of a management team don't work that way," he offers. "You know, you sit in a room, and you decide what you're gonna do, and even if you disagree, you sign up and you go do it. You don't say, 'Well fuck you, I disagree. You didn't give me enough money for Netcenter, so huh.'" Only in the wake of the company's disastrous 1997 fourth quarter did the emphasis finally shift; at that point, Netscape retained an executive-search firm to locate a new content czar who could expand Netcenter. But when the idea of creating a separate division was broached, Homer says, "It just got to be such a big opportunity, I said to Jim, 'Hey, let me just go do this.'"
As Netcenter chief, Homer spiels a textbook portal game, following the profitable road map laid out by Yahoo!: "We've got 70 million viewers out there, they show up periodically, we don't know who they are, we get a lot of money for them based on this almost whimsical anonymous traffic - that's good. But man, we could do a lot better if we would figure out who they are, through memberships, and bind them to us in a way that got them to want to use the site more. That means a broader set of services, services that are interrelated - and then improving the economics of all that through targeting and personalization. And that was the whole rationale for Netcenter."
That's now been coupled with another mantra at Netscape: Synergy exists between the revised "we're not competing with Lotus anymore" enterprise division run by Marc Andreessen, and Homer's Netcenter, which delivers software packages, messaging services, and content to companies - like ISPs - with millions of individual customers.
The early returns on the strategy in Netcenter: In the company's quarter ending July 31 (Netscape changed its fiscal year end in early 1998), Web site revenue had grown 33 percent from Q3 1997. Netcenter membership and traffic were up smartly. But the dark lining in that silver cloud was that rival Yahoo! showed a 192 percent quarter-over-quarter revenue gain in its most recent report. In other words, Homer hasn't hit a home run yet.
Among current and past colleagues, handicapping whether Homer can bring home a winner largely comes down to how he has handled Netscape's Web site since its inception four years ago. Homer himself says he first saw the site as a way to overcome one of the classic start-up problems - a lack of marketing money.
When the Web went into hyperdrive in autumn 1994, Netscape had an asset no one else could match - a captive audience consisting of new users launching Mozilla every time they went online. "At the time, of course, what I was thinking was, 'Make it a killer Web site. They'll all come to get software. When they come to get software, I'll stuff a brochure in their face. It will trade them up; it will get 'em to pay online.' I was just superexcited about all that."
But when early Web publishers like HotWired and Pathfinder began to demonstrate they could draw ad dollars with their sites, Netscape dove in with its own advertising effort. In Homer's eyes, the extra revenue was a great way to supplement his meager marketing budget. "I knew that, hey, if I could liquidate some of the expenses of running the Web site and get some revenues, then I could put more into the Web site, and I could build it up."
Hugh Hempel, an old Apple colleague, oversaw the site for Homer and hired veterans of online and print publishing like Barbara Gore (who had worked at Prodigy) to lead the staff. By his account, the new employees began to push for an expanded, editorially focused site. Hempel deferred to Homer. "I was a marketing guy. I was there to flog software," Hempel says. "Jim Clark was always adamant about selling advertising on the Web site, but he got pushback from Mike and others who wanted it to stay focused on marketing."
"We made a presentation to Homer," says one of several people who attended a series of meetings in which the frustrated Web staff presented its proposals to Homer. "About two-thirds of the way through the presentation, he interrupted us and said, 'What, you think you're going to be some sort of editorial gods choosing who gets on the site? We're not going to do this - we need to feature our partners.' And he didn't want to charge the partners - he wanted to feature them for free."
Homer defends Netscape's failure to reposition the Web site any earlier by suggesting that the fast-growing company couldn't afford to be distracted from its focus on the big-ticket opportunities of the enterprise business. And he musters the valid, if uninspired, defense that no one at Netscape or anywhere else had any real idea what future revenues or business plans would look like. (In 1995, Netscape even provided free server hosting and bandwidth to Yahoo! when Jerry Yang and David Filo moved their service out of Stanford. Hempel remembers a lunch at which Yang and Filo sought his and Homer's advice on what to do with the nascent Web directory.)
"We had these people from traditional publishing, and it was like a religious issue for them," is how Homer characterizes the battle over the Web site's future. Somewhat defensively, he blames the staff back then for being too obsessed with issues of a church-state wall of integrity between the business and editorial sides of the new medium. "This was the Net, we were supposed to be new, right?" he says. "I didn't think there should be a wall."
Intuit's Bill Campbell says that another of Homer's standout attributes is his diligence in studying new subject matter: "He has an unbelievable desire to learn. He would stay up all night for days just to be able to converse intelligently with you." That schoolboy enthusiasm emerges when Homer discusses his career's yaw from sales and marketing tough to new media mogul. He shares emails from his staff about the remarkable similarities between Citibank's decision to claim a prime sponsorship position inside Netcenter's personal-finance channel and Anheuser-Busch's decision in 1979 to commit ad dollars to a then little-known cable television subsidiary of the Getty Oil company called ESPN. And he gushes over the future of portals: "By the year 2000, portals won't be just consumer portals. They start to get very greatly into the whole business area. Then they start to become the starter kit for our enterprise software, right? Because we sell mail and messaging infrastructures to very big enterprises. And we give free email away on the site." Companies could send small groups - 10, 20, 50 users - to sign up. "But many more would use it if we said, 'One guy can sign you all up, central administration, unique for your company, privacy that is dictated by your one systems admin.' Boy, then you've got a free email package that's for a company of a hundred people. Then you go to the next step, which is go for a thousand people, and then at some point those guys want to buy your software."
Homer is not always so on top of his rap, though. At a company strategy day in June, held at The Golden Gate Club in the Presidio of San Francisco, another side of Homer is on view. Onstage to tell assembled reporters and analysts how the new Netcenter will make the world (and his company's fortunes) better, Homer must participate in some scripted give-and-take with a Netscape staff member. The staffer gamely tries to engage him in a natural-sounding dialog. But Homer's eyes never lift from his script. "Let's - go - back - to - the - home - page - for - fur - ther - Net - cen - ter - ex - plor - a - tion," he drones. Later, he said that he was beset by prematrimonial jitters. It was, as several observers commented, the kind of intensely embarrassing moment that made one wonder whether Barksdale had done the right thing in choosing Homer for the job that could make or break the company.
The performance ends with some unfortunately symbolic technical difficulties. "Let's look to the future," Homer says, but with exquisitely malign timing, the hum of a small motor fills the room.
As Homer struggles through the end of his remarks, the shades covering a two-story wall of paned glass behind him begin to retract. The view - the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate gleaming through shreds of fog that are giving way to a brilliant day - is sublime. Good omen? Spectacular vistas for on-the-rebound Netscape? But the motor continues to hum, and the shades descend again, closing off the vista as Homer concludes his talk. Bad omen? Continued gloom for troubled browser maker?
While the industry gods are commonly believed to communicate in signs, most such messages are found in quarterly reports and stock charts. And right now, the NSCP tables don't tell a clear story. For the future, one of Homer's GO pals, Randy Komisar, says only one thing is certain: Homer will share Netscape's fate. "If that ship's going down," Komisar offers, "he's going with it." Raising hackles all the way.
Homer's summation?
"I wanted to do Netcenter partly so I could show the whole rest of the company that an entrepreneurial thing could be done inside of Netscape, for the first time. 'Cause the first time's an important time.
If you go around and ask people about how they like the Netcenter experiment, in terms of creating a division and all that, I think you'll see most people think it's really cool that we're doing it, and that we were willing to do it, and able to do it, and all those sorts of things." Pause. In his excitement, a hint of his characteristic fire appears. But this is the toned-down Homer, and he smothers the flames. "And making it work is making a good business out of it now, which - you know, we're working on it."
