Spyglass: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

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 and created to commercialize and support technologies from 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 was licensed to Microsoft for Internet Explorer to be built upon.

The Browser Wars

Netscape Communications Corporation, co-founded by Marc Andreesen, released its flagship Netscape Navigator browser in October 1994, and it took off the next year. Microsoft saw the success of Netscape and recognized the potential of the web. In 1995, Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass as the basis of Internet Explorer 1.0 which it released as part of the Microsoft Windows 95.

The arrangement for the licence was that Spyglass would receive a quarterly fee plus a percentage of Microsoft's revenues for the software. Microsoft subsequently gave Internet Explorer away for free, 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 acknowledge Spyglass as the licensee for the IE browser code: "Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc."

On March 26, 2000, OpenTV bought out Spyglass Inc. in a stock exchange worth $2.5 billion. The acquisition was completed on July 24, 2000. OpenTV got Device Mosaic, an embeded web browser, and Spyglass Prism is a content delivery and transformation system.