Book Review: Architects of the Web
By Robert H.Reid. Published by John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-17187-5
1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business
Like most professionals, I try (not always successfully) keep
up to date with trends in the industry. So it may be surprising to admit that I have recently read a book that is out-of-date. Even more surprising, when I reveal that the book was published in early 1997. But not so surprising when I explain that the subject matter was the World Wide Web, the IT phenomenon that exploded onto the world in 1993, with the release of a crash-prone piece of undergraduate software called Mosaic.
Although the sub-title of this book (above) is pretentious ("the future of business" ?? - give me a break !!), there is no doubt that the Web has been a huge new factor in business, in IT strategy, and in how information is perceived and managed.
The Web has also been a huge pioneering area, where small start-up companies were able (at least for a short time) to wrong-foot even the mighty Microsoft. Such is the subject of this book.
Accidental Millionaires
This is not so much a chronological book (after all, it only spans 3 year in total), as a collection of essays about how previously unknown people ended up being multi-millionaires virtually overnight.
Maybe they were the right people in the right place at the right time. Maybe they (alone among their peers) had the foresight to see the potential of this new, untested, untried medium. Or maybe they just got lucky. You can read the book and decide for yourself.
I must admit that I was carried along by the pace of the book. I followed every twist and turn of the saga as Marc (".. if you need to ask his surname, you don't know about the Web...." ) struggled with NSCA and finally drove back in to town to persuade his friends to turn down good University jobs for a new company which had no hope of making any money, even before it started !.
Then there was Kim Polese, good at doing software demos, who came across a weird group of progammers writing a run-time system for linking up washing machines called "Oak". Who would have imagined that it would have graduated from the "Skunk Works" to become "Java", to add millions to Sun's Stock Valuation, and end up with Kim as CEO of Marimba ? Marimba, by the way, was initially known as a "YAJSU" - Yet Another Java Start-Up - there were so many Java-related companies being floated off at the time. The difference with Marimba was that four of them walked straight out of Sun on the same day, and into history.
It wasn't all success, though. How many people think that VRML is "the new way forward" ? Yet Marke Pesce was heading for even greater success than Netscape. So what went wrong ? The book can hardly answer this. The final chapters on other companies like I/PRO and Wired have still to be written. In fact, this book can only give a glimpse of the first beginnings.
You are left speculating - is there another, yet-undiscovered - Yahoo ! or Netscape, out there, waiting to hit the Web with a bright new idea ? Probably there is, and equally probably it would be led by a 20-something degree-educated "kid" with a bright idea, lots of enthusiasm, and the ability to surround himself (or herself) with clever people, some of whom have money to invest.
Common Theme - Geeks v. Suits
Almost by accident, you begin to spot a trend. The phrase "they needed a business plan" pops up time and again. For many people (with the possible exception of Halsey Minor of CNET), it appears that they set up business with a combination of technical enthusiasm and some half-expressed instinct that "there is money to be made here, somehow".
Yahoo ! (also known initially as "Dave & Jerry's Guide to the World-Wide-Web") is a case in point. Apart from genuine enthusiasm for their "indexing system", they just worked on the assumption that "more hits were better than less", and that somehow, some day, they would work out how to make money from this thing that was beginning to dominate their lives.
The answer, in the end, was Advertising, which is where I/PRO and other companies begin to get involved, where "Banners" and "click-through" rates began to take over from boyish enthusiasm.
What ? No Amazon.com ?
I had expected to see the famous "amazon.com" included in this list of essays. But apart from a brief mention, there is no in-depth study on this book-selling enterprise that is beginning to pioneer the concept of "e-commerce". Maybe because the book was written in 1996, the author had not yet anticipated the huge wave of interest in electronic sales, culminating in even IBM advertising "E-" numbers nationally.
Also missing, except as a side-reference, was Microsoft themselves, and the huge battles over "thin clients", and the Windows Internet Explorer.
It's hard to realise that a few years ago most of us had no idea what the web was, let alone that Microsoft would about-turn it's marketing focus so quickly as it did in the famous "Pearl Harbour" announcement - "from now on, everything we do will be internet-enabled" !
The fact is that the web is changing so fast, and fortunes are made and lost so quickly, that it is very hard for anyone to keep track of the current trends.
The Web According to the USA
This is a very US-centric book. In fact, the world appears to exist in a continuum from Seattle, WA, to San Jose, CA. I suppose that this is fair. There are so many start-ups and technical breakthroughs which have been based around the US west coast. The area is full of good technical people (some of whom leave large companies, others get head-hunted) and many rich venture capitalists who are keen to fund pre-IPO start-ups with the prospect of 6-times return on revenue when (or if) they finally get a business plan together.
But it is surprising to find that while the early days of ARPAnet is mentioned, the author fails to realise (or maybe just fails to acknowledge) that the Europeans had been linking computers together years earlier. Tim Berners-Lee, the designer of much of the web's protocols, gets a minor mention.
Despite this bias, the book is excellent reading, whether you are a prospective millionaire-techie, a venture-capitalist-businessman, a student of social history, someone who is intrigued by "what is this web thing ?".
It's a technical adventure story, the '90's equivalent of "Soul of a New Machine"
Get this book, and read it quickly.
Before you have finished it, the Web will have changed again.
Book Reviewed by Dennis Adams in December 1998.
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