Some memoirs from Susiew, a snapshot in time that's a humorous flash back of so many things we now take for granted as technology has evolved: July 3, 1996 I headed for work around 6:40 to our new building at 1295 Charleston. Netscape now has about 1200 employees and I was 609 on January 22. Because espresso machines haven't been installed yet in our new place, I made sure to leave time and head to 501 Middlefield where I promptly beelined for a machine. The Pavoni espresso machines and professional grinders are the first feature I display when touring people or interviewing. I headed for 685, the engineering building. Between two of their buildings is a walkway with ping pong and pool tables and popcorn machine. Don't they think we marketing types need to relax and have fun to be creative too? I still can't get over how intense and cool their interior design is, from entries at strange angles to walls alternating bright pastels with bright orange or red or lime green walls, and lime green chairs. (My building has HOT pink chairs.). I truly delighted in the conference room names not realizing the one I'd reserved, Attica, signified a whole series named after prisons - Leavenworth, Sing Sing etc. This was my first official meeting with engineering. I'm working on producing a CD of test drive SuiteSpot servers. I found one engineer who has been extremely helpful who works on mail and news servers (chofmann). I hadn't realized this whole project was really the equivalent to launching a product. So the meeting was with Chris Cardiff, the release engineering manager, who said an intern could work on it. There are legendary cubicles at Netscape and I'm not sure I know the people associatd with them. In the old building one had an army tarp draped over it. Here one has a Halloweenish cube ddraped with spider webs and very dark. Another nearby has a pirate flag as a door to his cube. Went back to 501 and greeted Danny Shader, taught a new guy how to make lattes by making one for myself, and headed for 525. On the way I decided to stop at the help desk, not only to harrass the guys who work there for old times sake but to report a virus, Form A to be exact. Since we have no cafeteria I stopped by Safeway and loaded up on provisions such as Cheez Its. I had decided I didn't need to go to an "Appalanche" meeting," on our top secret project to develop applications to work with SuiteSpot, which people will be able to download. My role is to direct the producer in electronic marketing, to have the agency create the home site and a virtual intranet. I conference called in and also learned I would be creating banner advertising to promote Appalanche. I spent the afternoon editing the copy for the test drive CD booklet and when I discovered a website another company had created largely by copying and pasting code and content from our website, I went down to show Liz, an editor, and we were all aghast. We had our first "large" group staff meeting. It's hard to believe most of the time I've been at Netscape, the group was me and Kurt. Our budgets have been slashed way down so my only really big project is creating an intranet site for Appalanche. Yesterday we had an all marketing meeting at the Grosvenor hotel near SFO. At the meeting there was someone from each group lined up like customer marketing, product marketing, electronic marketing to present their Q3 strategies. I've been working on this HTML yearbook of the attendees at the Internet 96 conference. At the conference I'd rented an Apple digital camera to snap people's pictures. We got about 75 pics. I loaded them into a template created in Navigator Gold to demonstrate how Gold worked, and everyone ate it up. It IS totally cool. ------------------- 2/28/97 The Day the Power Went Out at Netscape It was a blustery sunny morning with cherry blossam petals floating through the parking lot at 1295 Charleston, home of most of Netscape marketing. The Enterprise Marketing group - now about 10 people, led by Kurt (and I was the second person in the group) had adjourned from the weekly status meeting, 9am Fridays. I was trying to focus on my 2 big projects - updating our Intranet Solutions website with new sections and getting a customer section created on our private "extranet" site. I'd updated lots of documents but had decided not to print them. I was about to restart my Stinkpad to clear the RAM when all of a sudden "ENHHHHH" the unmistakable sound of a generator blowing. The lights extinguished in unison with the army of PCs across the floor. Groans and shouts in the dark. People milling around, no way to produce emails, Word documents, HTML or program databases. Off to lunch.