Spyglass Mosaic

» see spyglass.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I used this browser for about seven years without once knowing its name. Every machine I sat at in Turkey from '98 onward had Internet Explorer on it, and if you opened Help and then About, the box told you the truth in two flat lines: based on NCSA Mosaic, distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc. I read that a hundred times and filed it under legal text. it was a receipt.

Spyglass was founded in 1990 in Champaign, Illinois, out of the same university that had produced NCSA and therefore Mosaic itself. In May 1994 it licensed the Mosaic name and technology from NCSA, then did the thing NCSA had not: it built one proper codebase where the features were shared across platforms instead of three student projects wearing the same logo. that made it the browser you licensed if you were a company that needed a browser and did not want to write one.

Plenty of companies needed one. CompuServe shipped it, and IBM licensed it. anyway, in January 1995 Microsoft signed too, and the terms were the ordinary terms of that year: a quarterly fee, plus a percentage of what Microsoft made selling the software. Internet Explorer 1 went out on 24 August '95, bundled into Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95, and it was Spyglass Mosaic with the labels changed.

Then Microsoft made Internet Explorer free, which meant Microsoft made nothing on it, which meant the percentage of nothing that Spyglass was owed came to nothing. the internal mood in Champaign that year. What is on the record is that Spyglass moved to audit the contract in 1997 and the matter closed on 22 January of that year with Microsoft paying eight million dollars, which was a rounding error against what the browser was already worth to Windows.

~ the record ~

~ the deal ~

The contract is the whole grave and it is worth reading slowly. Spyglass did not sell Microsoft a browser. it rented one, on the assumption that a browser was a product with a price, because in 1995 every browser had a price. Netscape charged. Spyglass charged its OEMs. the entire industry agreed on the shape of the business, and the agreement was written inside that shape.

Microsoft did not break the contract. It obeyed it exactly, and paid the minimum quarterly fee it was required to pay, having removed the variable part by removing the price. that is not even unusual behavior. it is what happens when one party to a deal has a second business that the deal was never measured against.

~ what it became ~

Spyglass did not sit still. It took the browser off the desktop and pushed it into hardware, where nobody had a free alternative bundled with an operating system yet, and for a few years that looked clever. The code ended up in set-top boxes and in odd corners: there was a version running on a Nintendo 64 for the SharkWire Online adapter, which is a sentence I enjoyed finding.

On 26 March 2000 OpenTV announced it was buying the company in a stock swap valued at two and a half billion dollars, a number that tells you exactly which month of which year it was. the deal completed on 24 July 2000 and Spyglass stopped existing as a company. OpenTV itself was bought by Kudelski a decade later, which is why spyglass.com today serves a Swiss conglomerate's marketing pages.

~ the long tail ~

The credit outlived the company by six years. Every copy of Internet Explorer through version 6 carried both lines in its About box, so through the whole IE6 monoculture, on hundreds of millions of machines, a dead Illinois licensor was named in software nobody thought had an author. Microsoft audited version 7 specifically to confirm no Mosaic code was left, and the lines came out.

So the thing that is strange about Spyglass is not that it lost. still, it is that it won the bid and lost anyway. it beat Netscape to the biggest customer on earth and got paid a fee for the privilege of being installed on every computer in the world, without ever having a user who knew that is what they were running. I was one of them for years.

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