This seems a lot like a response to Google's Nest acquisition.
Google and Apple are rapidly moving in to an area with a lot of activity. There has been a recent surge of home automation startups and platforms like Revolv (http://revolv.com/), SmartThings (http://www.smartthings.com/), WigWag (http://www.wigwag.com/). One of the problems they are addressing is how to marge multiple different home automation standards (Z-Wave, ZigBee, Bluetooth Smart, 6LoWPAN). Presumably the new Apple HomeKit will be based on a single standard, Bluetooth Smart, given the Apple / iBeacon rollout.
There are also a bunch of more generic development platforms around, like relayr (http://relayr.io/) and Thingsquare (http://www.thingsquare.com/), that are targeting the device manufacturers directly. Will be interesting to see what impact Apple will have on the growth of this market, and the technology choices. Apple isn't always right (and neither is Google).
There is a mechanism called WiFi Protected Setup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Setup) that does something similar, but none of the home routers I've personally used have had this feature. There is a mandatory push-button mode in there.
Strictly speaking, however, there is a difference between knowing about Netscape and knowing what they were doing. Myself, I used Netscape software daily between 1996 and 2000 something but can't say I really knew what the company was doing. Sure, I know all about that they released a web browser for free, but I have no real idea (without looking it up on Wikipedia) what they really did for their shareholders.
So I could definitely see myself posing that exact same question to Marc Andreessen.
I think the message the blog post is conveying is that Bootstrap grew out of two developers wanting to build something, not out of a manager wanting to setup an internal project and assemblying a team being instructed to work on the project.
It was going strong when I submitted the link, albeit a bit slow, but I would guess the poor server is now taking quite a beating from being on the Hacker News front page.