However, since I was the Project Lead for the Spyglass browser team, there is one correction I can offer: We licensed the Mosaic code, but we never used any of it. Spyglass Mosaic was written from scratch.
In big picture terms, Marc's recollections look essentially correct, and he even shared a couple of credible-looking tidbits that I didn't know.
It was a crazy time. Netscape beat us, but I remember my boss observing that we beat everyone who didn't outspend us by a favor of five. I didn't get mega-rich or mega-famous like Marc (deservedly) did, but I learned a lot, and I remain thankful to have been involved in the story.
While Marc recounts that Microsoft offered for Spyglass to sell "Microsoft Mosaic" as an add-on while still offering your own independent version - despite MSFT eventually making its own browser free anyway - is there anything within that part of the larger story that you would elucidate to tell differently, or clarify deeper into its weeds? It was always one of the parts of the story that was more glossed over.
I can’t recall the exact timing of when NCSA ceded all sublicensing rights to Spyglass. It may have been after that experience or a relief that they could send MS away in good conscience.
In my recollection, the initial payment from Microsoft to Spyglass was higher than what Marc said, but I'm not sure.
But I am sure that the deal was later renegotiated at a substantially higher number.
I'm also pretty sure that even after that rework of the terms, Spyglass didn't get enough from Microsoft to compensate for the fact that Microsoft, er, you know, killed the browser business. And insofar as that is the essence of Marc's point, I agree with it.
"The Microsoft guys call Spyglass and they're like, yeah, we want to license Spyglass Mosaic so we can build it into Windows. The Spyglass guys say, yeah, that sounds great. Basically, how much per copy are you going to pay us for that? Microsoft says, you don't understand, we're going to pay you a flat fee, which is the same thing that Microsoft did when they originally licensed DOS way back when. But Microsoft said, basically, or at least my understanding of what Microsoft said was, don't worry about it. We're going to sell it as an add-on to Windows. We'll have Microsoft Mosaic and then you'll still have Spyglass Mosaic and you can sell it on other operating systems or compete with us or whatever, do whatever you want."
Thank you for your response!
I was hired in Sept 1998 to work on the browser; we had built our own Javascript engine to add to it (since that was kinda required for the web by then). I rewrote all the table code, because it just really didn't work well when you had "too few" horizontal pixels, especially if table widths were expressed in things like %. In the end, after a major redesign of all the table code, it did better than Netscape did in the 'hard' cases.
However, before long, it became apparent with all the additions being made as part of HTML4 that sticking with Spyglass-derived code and trying to update it ourselves to compatibly implement HTML4 (or enough of it) was going to be a herculean effort for a small company (max ~350 people and briefly a $1B valuation (1999), but only around 5 or 10 people max on the browser, including the JS engine.
Given that, I made the decision in late 1999/early 2000 to switch us to the upcoming Mozilla open-source browser, and got deeply involved. The Internet-over-cable-TV part of the company failed (cable companies had other priorities, like breaking TVGuide's patent monopoly, which they paid us to do for them), and we moved onto other markets (hardware videophones) not involving browsers in 2003. I stayed involved peripherally in Mozilla, and when WorldGate dissolved in 2011 I joined Mozilla fulltime to lead the WebRTC effort.
The Spyglass internal architecture seemed at the time to be pretty reasonable compared to what I knew of the NCSA code.