- Note: This article is about Spyglass, Inc. Spyglass is also a term for a telescope, and Spy Glass is a recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live.
Spyglass, Inc., was an internet software company (NASDAQ SPYG) based in Champaign, Illinois. The company, founded in 1990, was an offshoot of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and created to commercialize and support technologies from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Prominent among these was the Mosaic browser, of which Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks to develop their own Web browser. The source code of Spyglass Mosaic was licensed to Microsoft and became the basis for their Internet Explorer.
The Browser Wars
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Netscape Communications Corporation, co-founded by Marc Andreessen, released its flagship Netscape Navigator browser in October 1994, and shortly Netscape was becoming the industry leader. Microsoft quickly recognized the potential of the web, and wanting to get into the browser game as soon as possible, decided to license an existing browser rather than build one from scratch.
After unsuccessfully trying to license the Netscape Navigator browser, Microsoft turned to Spyglass and their Mosaic. In 1995, Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass as the basis of Internet Explorer 1.0, which was released as an add-on to Windows 95 in the Microsoft Plus! software package. The deal stipulated that Spyglass would receive a base quarterly fee for the Mosaic license plus a royalty from Microsoft's Internet Explorer revenue.
Microsoft subsequently bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, and thus (making no direct revenues on IE) paid only the minimum quarterly fee. In 1997, Spyglass threatened Microsoft with a contractual audit, in response to which Microsoft settled for US$8 million. [1]
All versions of the Internet Explorer software continue to acknowledge Spyglass as the licensor for the IE browser code in the about screens seen as "Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc."
The end of Spyglass
On March 26, 2000, OpenTV bought out Spyglass in a stock swap worth $2.5 billion. The acquisition was completed July 24, 2000. In the deal, they received both Device Mosaic, an embedded web browser, and Prism, a content delivery and transformation system.
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