EricEwe.com

Back when in the good old days, there was only one decent way to get on the internet – NETSCAPE (I wouldn’t consider telnet a way to reach the WWW). But with Microsoft’s push for Internet Explorer and the initiation of the “browser wars” in the 1990s, that led to Netscape’s demise. Following that, Microsoft via Internet Explorer controlled 90% of the browser market.

Marc Andreessen, the founder is back and he is back with a vengeance. Andreessen who is now a VC is backing up the company that he co-founded, RockMelt. He co-founded this company, then sold it to Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for about $1.6 billion, but he is now back in the “browser war” when he poured money into the RockMelt as a VC.

At present, the browser market landscape consist of:

I know it can be a lucrative business to control searches and know more about your web users by controlling the browsers. Clearly, Google knows about the importance of browser and paid Mozilla, a nonprofit organization $75 million in 2007 to be their exclusive search partner, not to mention, Google also launched their browser -Google Chrome.

There were speculations that RockMelt is working with Facebook, but this was quashed by a Facebook spokesperson today.

That bring me to the questions,
1) Do we have more than enough browsers?
2) What can RockMelt provide that can’t be easily duplicated by Mozilla, Microsoft or Google with a month or so?
3) Do you think HP will recover their 1.6 billion investment?

*Note: Google Chrome was released on Sept 2, 2008. So they are still a new player in the market.