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Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days That Built the Future of Business Jack Solock, Special Librarian May 1997 This new book, written by Robert H. Reid, an ex-Silicon Graphics (SGI) employee who now works for the Twenty-First Century Internet venture capital fund, is destined to become a classic book on the Internet because it tells the story of the founders of a new business enterprise. No matter what happens to these entrepreneurs, technical wizards, and content providers in the future, they have helped to build a business model for a new technology and a new age. Architects of the Web tells the stories of Marc Andreessen and Netscape, (http://www.netscape.com/); Rob Glaser and RealAudio ( http://www.realaudio.com/); Kim Polese and both Java ( http://www.sun.com/java/) and Marimba ( http://www.marimba.com/); Mark Pesce and VRML; Ariel Poler and I/Pro (http://www.ipro.com/); Jerry Yang and Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/); Andrew Anker and HotWired ( http://www.hotwired.com/); and Halsey Minor and c|net ( http://cnet.com/), from three different perspectives, only two of which are effective. The first is the personal stories of "how they did it," presented as anecdotal interviews, interspersed with Reid's explanation and amplification. The second is an explanation of what makes each contribution unique to the Internet. These explanations lead into the third aspect, which is how the contribution can be exploited for business purposes. The "personal stories" aspect is the most satifying, as the reader is transported to watershed moments in Internet history, sharing those great moments with the people who made them. For months Andreessen and Eric Bina "work three to four days straight, then crash for about a day, " Bina being "the heart and soul of the code, " while Andreessen "[comes] up with the ideas" leading to Mosaic, the precursor of Netscape's Navigator. Mark Pesche wants to "teach [computers] to speak to our hearts' in order 'to make [them] clear to our minds," which leads to his pioneering work with VRML. Jerry Yang and Dave Filo build a graduate student hobby into a multi-million dollar business, but never forget their roots (days at a time in a Stanford University trailer, lovingly building the subject hierarchy that is to become Yahoo!). And so it goes. Such watershed developments take inspiration, dedication, and untold hours of hard work (at a manic, often obsessive pace, as the behind-the-scenes story of the actual development work on Navigator, told by Lou Montulli, show very clearly). They do not come cheaply or easily. And it is in telling these stories that Reid is very compelling. The second aspect, explanations of the technologies, is less satisfying because it is interspersed among the personal stories and the business motivations, and told at a breakneck pace. Characters enter and exit the stories at a dizzying rate, and the stories themselves are often told in a narrative style that seems closely related to that of a pizza and caffeine-besotted programmer at 3:00 a.m. Of course, depending upon the reader's expertise, he or she might find some parts of this more interesting than others (as I found the explanation of Yahoo! more interesting than the drawn out explanation of Java). That said, however, probably the most effective method of explaining a technology in the whole book is the comparison of Open Inventor vs. OpenGL code in the development of three-dimensional scenes. One doesn't have to be a programmer to understand what Pesce was after in creating a simple VRML specification. It is the third aspect of this book, the business aspect, which is, in the end, its lasting legacy. The title of this book tells all. It is "1,000 days that built the future of business," not the Internet. Because that, at bottom, is what this book is about--making the Internet pay. Here, Reid is at his best. Netscape's example shows that market share now means revenue later, even if revenue is not realized in the short term. RealAudio's rise demonstrates the power of laying one technology on top of another (adding a helper to a browser, and in one swoop, turning the Internet into radio). It also shows how to exploit this new medium to "nichecast"; that is, to use the space- and time-shattering abilities of the Internet to search out a paying audience (through either actually selling a product or simply advertising for one). Reid demonstrates that Java has the potential to replace desktop applications, and perhaps ultimately operating systems. VRML can, in the short run, create "stadiums and theatres" to be "online ticket vendors," and in the long run sustain lush, almost addictive interactive environments. The key here is to get people to go to the site, to draw in the users. There might not be a way to make money from it now, but the above market share-revenue principle will work, sooner or later. It is in the later chapters of the book that Reid slips the business model into high gear. I/Pro, with its demonstration of the abilities to use log files to audit site visits, is a marketer's dream. Now money making is no longer theory. Targeted advertising can really work. Yahoo! is much more than simply a directory service. By being the first "human" directory service, building a product identity and an ever growing clientele, it can sell a lot of specifically targeted advertising. But that is not all. Reid shows the genius of building ancillary services that feed into and draw from the main one. And so we see the business logic of geographically differentiated directory and map-making Yahoo!s. Here also is demonstrated the tremendous profit-making ability of cross-fertilization between media, with Yahoo! Internet Life and increasing exposure of Yahoo! on television. Reid explains, with respect to Yahoo!, that "...it turns out that giving away service over the Web has a real first-mover advantage to it. This is because success in this model is measured in traffic, and traffic on the Web begets more traffic." As the web has no inherent geographic or time barriers, the size of the potential market can be eventually equated to the entire population of the planet, the biggest market of them all. HotWired is given its due as an early and prolific content creator, but it also invented the banner ad motif; this, perhaps, will be its ultimate legacy. As companies realize the size and deep pockets of this new market, they will begin to exploit it, first through advertising at content-driven sites, but later by creating their own compelling sites. The ultimate logic of all this is played out in the c|net chapter that closes the book. Reid gushes over the genius of building cable TV programming and cross-fertilizing it with a web site. Without doubt c|net creates prolific and excellent web content, but what is really important is that viewers turn as many pages as possible. This in turn affects writing style (it is bad to ask a web viewer to read too much on the computer screen, because it is hard on the eyes, and only a limited amount of banner advertising can be viewed). And so the reader is given the model of the web page as "inventory." Keep those pages flipping. And even better, with the ability to audit views of the pages, future content of the site can be altered by what is popular with readers now. The web, then, is a dream come true for the marketer and the venture capitalist. It can be made to pay, and these pioneering entrepreneurs have shown the way. It is a city of gold! However, there is a disturbing presence that keeps popping up throughout several chapters of this book. It is Microsoft, competing against Java and VRML, with Visual Basic and ActiveX. At present, Andreessen and Netscape are involved in fierce battle with Microsoft. Reid lauds this brave battle and wishes Netscape well. After all, the city of gold should be open to as many miners as possible, because they will keep very many venture capitalists in business. There is a poignant irony in the book in how Reid ends each chapter, describing where these great pioneers are now. Ariel Poler of I/Pro has left voluntarily, "looking forward to not being an Internet entrepreneur" (for the moment, anyway). Mark Pesce has no plans for a startup. Kim Polese wants to lead "many lives," of which Internet entrepreneur may only be one. Jerry Yang says "We started this with nothing, and I can honestly say I don't mind if we went back to nothing, because I had a great time." And Halsey Minor, perhaps the most hard-headed capitalist in the entire book, "regrets that what he does now is in some respects not as 'mind expansive' as the matters that took up his hours when he was a student. He enjoys business. But in the end, 'business is business. It's creative, but it's not, like, really creative. And if you get really creative, investors get worried, as they should." The irony here is that one-day Andreessen may realize he has few or no allies to battle Microsoft with. What will happen to the golden city? This, of course, is the inexorable logic of capitalism, moving from an entrepreneurial, laissez-faire state, to an oligopolistic one. Reid misses it completely because he is blind to the dazzle of the gold. The fact that the Internet is now a "business plan" is assumed by many, including the author of this book. But the Internet did not start out as a business plan. Is the business plan model necessarily the best model to provide what the Internet has always been touted for: increased understanding through communication, and increased democratization as a result of its use? This begs an additional question: "Have we been here before?" Have there been other times in our history when a shiny new, democratizing, empowering communications medium was appropriated by the private sector, in order to make it pay? And if there is an example, what has been the result of this appropriation? Of course, the answer is yes. Radio in the 1920s was in many ways similar to what the Internet is now. It was at a crossroads. By the middle 1930s it had transformed into something completely different, something very similar to what it is today. And it is to radio, and the possible lessons that it carries for the Internet, that we will turn next.
Copyright Susan Calcari and the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, 1994-1998. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the End User's Corner provided the copyright notice and this paragraph is preserved on all copies. The Internet Scout Project provides information about the Internet to the US research and education community under a grant from the National Science Foundation, number NCR-9712140. The Government has certain rights in this material. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Wisconsin - Madison or the National Science Foundation.
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Classic Books on the Internet - #2