Science & Tech Quote by Jim Barksdale

A practiced piece of late-90s corporate optimism, this line is really about buying time while projecting inevitability. “We’re proving ourselves as we go along” turns uncertainty into a virtue: not a company reacting, but a company learning in public, iterating in real time. It’s a soft rebuttal to skeptics without ever naming them - the rhetorical equivalent of smiling through volatility.

Barksdale’s key move is the word “evolutionary.” Evolution implies adaptation, not panic. It frames strategy as organic and continuous, a smart hedge in a Web market where business models were famously unstable and yesterday’s “platform” became tomorrow’s punchline. Calling it evolutionary also lowers the bar for coherence: if the plan changes, that’s not inconsistency, it’s survival.

Then comes the real tell: “making maximum advantage of our client browser, as well as our enterprise software.” This is a bridge between two constituencies and two revenue dreams. The browser is the mass-market flag planted in the consumer imagination; the enterprise software is where durable money lives. Barksdale is signaling that the company isn’t just chasing eyeballs - it intends to become infrastructure for the businesses rushing online.

Even “for people who want to build Web sites” carries an early-Web ambition: not merely to publish, but to equip. The subtext is competitive: we’re not just a website; we’re a toolkit, a gateway, a layer of control. In an era when “the Web” still sounded like a frontier, Barksdale is pitching Netscape as the mapmaker.