Bill Gates on Netscape | Larry Page and YouTube

Aug 6, 2023

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From: Bill Gates
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 1996 6:08 PM
To: Amar Nehru
Cc: Brad Chase; Brad Silverberg; Mike Brown; Greg Maffei; Richard Liotta
Subject: RE: 8/19 Netscape Exec Meeting Agenda

The outline you give below covers everything. However given the time limit I want to be clear on what is really important:

I don't want a lot of guesses about Netscape generated by people who may know less than I do. I want to learn a lot of facts - most of which I don't already know. You hit a lot of them in your full list but let me make clear which ones count:

Personnel. Really getting their headcounts and headcount plans for different areas is very important.
Future growth plan. Any data analyst's have about how they will grow their revenues. People are expecting Netscape to make a lot of money. How does that pencil out?
Geographic. Any data about sales by region and special regional strategies.
Development methodology. This gets into staffing but would have to be put together by someone in program management or engineering. Is cross-platform a lot of work for them? Is quality a challenge for them?
Recent speeches/interviews/analyst discussions from them about how they will beat us. Why didn't they outbid us on Eshop/Frontpage? Why haven't they attacked us on these distribution deals more - if AT&T was important enough for them to announce why didn't they offer AT&T compelling reasons to work with them? Of particular interest is how they will respond to ActiveX - clone? Opendoc?
Anything about the relationship between Netscape and Sun and Oracle would be quite valuable.
We should make sure our goals for Internet presence are low enough that we can achieve them but also say that Netscape has lost control. As we achieve our goals people should start to question Netscapes leadership.

[This document is from U.S. v. Microsoft (2000).]

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Further reading from Jules Cisek: “I worked at Netscape from '95 to '98. In the end none of the above bullet points really mattered. MS simply included IE for free with Windows. It's absurd that they got away with it. It also didn't help that Netscape was bloated with incompetent execs. And then it was acquired by AOL, a company even more bloated with incompetent execs.”

Previously: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (September 30, 1996)

Previously: Bill Gates emails Microsoft exec (October 26, 1997)

Larry Page emails Google exec

From: Larry Page
To: David Drummond
Sent: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 06:12:14 -0800

Where are we at on this?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan O'Connell
Date: Jan 22, 2006 10:54 PM
Subject: [Idea 3753] Partner/Acquire YouTube Before the Competition

We should look to either strike a significant partnership with YouTube or simply acquire them before someone else (namely Yahoo!) does. Yahoo's been on a tear of late acquiring some very interesting and popular sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us - it would make sense with our release of Video for them to look in this company's direction. They also just so happen to be down the street in San Mateo.

According to a Nielsen/NetRatings YouTube had more than 3 million visitors in December (triple the amount from November) - they get an estimated 20,000 new videos a day with users watching some 10 million. They're really the Flickr of Video with an almost identical interface that users love.

A second option would be to overhaul the UI for Video and finally depart from our standard interface with something similar to Lighthouse? It's apparent that users really want to tag, comment and share.

[This document is from the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee (2020).]

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Further reading from Dan O'Connell: “Funny enough (in hindsight of course), the idea received a fair amount of ‘Probably not a good idea’ and ‘Dangerous or harmful if implemented’ votes once it was posted.”

Previously: Larry Page: "I think we should look into acquiring [YouTube]" (November 8, 2005)

Previously: Eric Schmidt: “Can I get a quick analysis of the likely cost of acquiring YouTube?” (February 7, 2006)

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