Netscape's New News

The very day Nakayama Takuya left Santa Clara, Mountain View had already turned into a pot of boiling porridge.

In late March, Netscape publicly released a set of figures: as of that month, the company's cumulative profit had exceeded 7 million dollars.

That number was nothing much in a traditional industry, but the timing right now was simply too precise.

Silicon Valley Online had just used an IPO with an eighty-four-percent first-day surge to burn sentiment across America's investment circles to its peak. The afterheat had yet to fade, and Netscape came out and tossed another bundle of firewood onto it.

This time, the people on Wall Street did not even have the interest to pretend they were calm.

Put the two things together, and the chain of logic was clear—the internet industry was not just able to tell stories; it really was making money.

Silicon Valley Online could make money selling virtual outfits and virtual pets, and Netscape could also earn 7 million dollars in profit by selling software through online distribution.

What the market needed was exactly this: a living, breathing precedent with numbers on the books.

People from the major investment banks set out almost at the same time.

San Francisco International Airport was only a forty-minute drive from Mountain View. In the last few days of March, the parking lot outside Netscape's office was filled with cars bearing out-of-town plates. People from Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and DLJ packed the lobby, and the young woman at the front desk had to repeat the explanation dozens of times a day: "The CEO has no appointments scheduled today."

It was useless.

Early the next morning, the same group of people was still there.

After winding through several hands, the news reached Nakayama Takuya, who was on his way