Notes on Chapter 30

In Chapter 30, the bomb dropped: Netscape went public! The reality of this is explored: Janet doesn’t get rich immediately. For one thing, not all her shares are vested yet, and even if they were, there’s a “lockup” period to prevent all the employees from dumping their shares and running. Still. Millions. It isn’t like winning the lottery, though, in that you don’t get this big pile of money all dropped on you at once.

I had something similar four years later at Packeteer, although by that time there’d been many, many Internet IPO’s, and ours was modest by comparison. The details were still the same, though: at IPO time, there’s a very limited supply of shares, because most of them are locked up. So the price soars. Later, the market knew how that worked, and when the end of lockup period was approaching, the price plummeted. Bummer. All that money you never had anyway — gone.

We also have Grant in Taligent, pushing their object-oriented operating system, seemingly oblivious to the Internet explosion happening all around them. Not everyone got it! is the point I’m driving at here. That’s what you don’t get in non-fiction: in hindsight, supposedly everyone realized this was going to change everything. In reality, no they didn’t.

Bill Gates, the Eye of Sauron, had cast his baleful Eye on it though. Patrick, Miriam’s new husband, works for him and is diligently roaming the Valley and trying to snuff out this new threat to the Empire. Much of this came out in 1998 at the Federal antitrust trial.

In the next chapter, we catch up with Cassie, who’s at Palm. They have this cool device, which we now know as the Pilot, and they’re trying to figure out where the money is going to come from to launch it.