Andreessen: Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic for a $1 million flat fee
Marc Andreessen · Marc Andreessen on Inventing The Internet Browser (How We all Access the Internet) · Jun 28, 2024 · at 1:52:23
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz, describes how Microsoft negotiated a flat $1 million licensing deal with Spyglass for Mosaic browser code to enter the web browser market.
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“Spyglass gets this call from Microsoft and so the Microsoft guys call Spyglass, and they're like, yeah, we want to license Spyglass Mosaic so we can build it into Windows, and the Spyglass guys say, you know, yeah, that sounds great, you know, basically how much per you know, how much per copy are you gonna, you know, pay us for that? And Microsoft said, you don't understand. We're gonna, you know, we're gonna pay you a flat fee. You know, which is the same you know, which is the same you know, the same thing that Microsoft did originally licensed DOS way back when. And so, but Microsoft said, you know, basically, or at least my understanding of what Microsoft said was you know, don't worry about it. Like, you know, we're gonna sell it as an add on to windows. And, you know, so we'll have like Microsoft, you know, mosaic. And then, you know, you'll still have spyglass mosaic. And you can sell it on, on, you know, other operating systems or compete with us or whatever, do whatever you want. And so they struck the deal. I think it was like a million dollar one time payment.”
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