By the middle of the 1990s, Gates may have been as powerful as the president in some ways, yet he remained as paranoid as a speed freak at the end of a very long binge. The proximate cause of his paranoia was Netscape. In May 1995, in a now-famous memo titled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” Gates argued that the startup’s browser held the potential to “commoditize the underlying operating system” - Windows. What worried him, Gates told me, wasn’t merely the threat posed by the browser or other forms of middleware but the sudden momentum Netscape had gained in the industry. “Lightning struck,” Gates said. “There was a belief that they were the exciting thing, they were the coming company. You’d go to their developer conferences, go to Marc Andreessen’s press conferences, read the article about what flavor of pizza he ordered. That phenomenon was getting developers to pay a lot of attention to the Netscape browser.” He added, “Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.” And people were believing in Netscape.
