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!