IE won the browser wars because of the bundling. Netscape took itself out of the game because of the disaster that was Netscape 4 and 5. The first layoffs, per Jamie Zawinski, occurred in Jan 1998, after which the open source brainwave hit them. There were, per Zawinski, few external contributors, in specific because of the rewritten (by Collabra) Netscape 4 codebase (I think Brendan Eich has a slightly different opinion on this). Zawinski writes that his attempts to have the version 3 source code release were unsuccessful, and what went out was non-working spaghetti. Result: mozilla.org’s rewrite to the new Gecko engine. Essentially, Netscape had pioneered the modern Open Core idea.
I would say that Andreessen shares credit with Berners-Lee for setting the web in motion, especially by adding the GUI front-end (Mosaic) with Eric Bina. How much of that code was Andreessen’s (as opposed to Bina’s) is arguable, as is how much Berners-Lee’s hobbled together idea (and ill-designed protocol) was a standalone revolution. Neither had anything to do with the Internet and email. Or creating the code that was released, rewritten as Gecko, leading to Firefox via Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross.
To bring it back to the context: the email I send today is thanks to Dennis Ritchie, Bill Joy, Eric Allman, and hundreds of others, not Tim Berners-Lee. And when I wrote that “I don’t know why, but Jobs’s death makes me sad”, I was, without your reminder, quite aware of these facts. I was not under the misapprehension that the Internet, email or the web are due to Jobs. Hence, in fact, the “I don’t know why” i.e., in contrast to the more common narratives about Jobs, I do not consider him an innovator, visionary or genius. He was no technologist or uberhacker. He was not a design guru. His or Apple's products were/are rarely pioneering (or where they were, they failed, e.g: Newton, tv), perhaps with the rare exception of the iPhone. The strength of their OS was borrowed. Their software is buggy (try the new conversation view in Mail or Safari 5). Their practices deplorable. At the same time, I think Wojtek is laughably wrong about Apple’s success being a result of marketing. It is as laughable as to suggest that Windows won against Unix because of marketing (or even arm-twisting and other shady practices on the part of Gates), in the 90s. I don’t think Wojtek has ever used a Mac or spoken to lay Mac users (like my mother). Between his dismissal and the hyperbole surrounding Jobs/Apple lie, I believe, some interesting details about the success of their devices and software; exploring which, in no way, defends Apple’s practices as a corporation, Jobs behaviour as a human being.
—ravi