Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, is a Silicon Valley veteran at a mere 36 years of age. His latest pride, Ning, is a place were you can start your own social network. I think it’s an awesome idea. There already is one for media literacy, created by Understand Media’s Nick Pernisco.
What follows is a snip from a short interview with Anderson who has some pretty harsh words for the newspaper industry, but maybe he’s right.
SPIEGEL: But who is on to the next big thing? News Corp. bought MySpace, Google has invested in AOL, Microsoft purchased Facebook shares and is now fighting to acquire Yahoo. It looks like the pie will soon be cut up and distributed.
Andreesssen: No! If anything, I think this rate of change is accelerating. TV and the press have always functioned according to the same sets of rules and technical standards. But the Internet is based on software. And anybody can write a new piece of software on the Internet that years later a billion people are using. My theory is: Every year there is a new killer app. One year it’s Ebay, the next year it’s Craigslist, then it’s Napster, then Paypal, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and so on. I have invested in a whole series of start-ups that are all candidates to be one of these new big things — take Digg, for example …
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Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust — it has a business model that either works or it doesn’t.
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