Message from Michael -- June 23, 2008

HOW THE WEB WAS WON

QUOTES – FACTOIDS – THOUGHTS

AND A DISCLAIMER


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HOW THE WEB WAS WON: That’s the title of an article in the July issue of Vanity Fair which, among other things… clarifies that former vice president Al Gore never claimed to have “invented the Internet” but could rightfully claim that legislation he sponsored paved the way for the Internet… doesn’t clarify but does spell out the epic battle between Microsoft and Netscape… talks about the “Cro-Magnon” mentality of AT&T which lost out on the chance to get in on the ground floor of the Internet… and talks about when the “Infant Internet took its first breath”… as well as the “Kitty Hawk” moment of the Internet start-up. I highly recommend reading it, but in true MfM tradition, I read it for you. In fact, this week’s whole MfM is devoted to it. As you can tell from some of the quotes, the article is rightfully sub-titled An Oral History of the Internet. The “first breath” took place when Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer sciences at U.C.L.A., got his computer and the one at Stanford Research Institute to talk “host to host.” The “Kitty Hawk” moment was the very first International Conference on Computer Communications which demonstrated the potential of what was then known as the ARPAnet. As for the “Cro-Magnon” comment, that comes from Robert Taylor, the third director of ARPA’s computer science division, who developed the concept of “packet switching” which is a critical component of data transfer on the Internet but which the “suits” at AT&T said wouldn’t work. Why? Because it came from someone outside AT&T and so obviously “we didn’t know what we were doing.”

AT&T comes in for a lot of hammering. Robert Metcalfe who worked on Arpanet at M.I.T. and who invented Ethernet says that to this day he will have nothing to do with AT&T when he realized early on “that these sons of bitches were rooting against me.” But AT&T isn’t alone. Vinod Khosla who helped create Sun Microsystems talks about meeting with the C.E.O.’s of the major newspaper companies, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Gannett, Times Mirror and Tribune to propose something called the New Century Network. But the C.E.O.’s “couldn’t convince themselves” that Google, Yahoo or eBay would ever be important. When Microsoft decided to get into the online journalism business with Slate magazine, Editor Michael Kinsley recalls, the company wanted every writer to sign three different documents warranting the accuracy of everything they said and indemnifying Microsoft. Bill Bastone, founder of investigative journalism website The Smoking Gun, pokes fun at himself, noting that he didn’t even have an e-mail address when he started so he had to actually FAX out the press releases announcing the start of his website.

HOW THE WEB WAS WON ‘QUOTES’: From Vint Cerf, formerly with U.C.L.A. and now ‘chief Internet evangelist’ with Google, talking about those early years: “We had some idea of how powerful this was. What we didn’t know was the economics of it.” Rich Karlgaard, of Upside magazine, talks about asking a 25-year-old ‘vice president of business development’ during the dot-com bust period about whether his company is profitable or not, and gets the response, “we’re a pre-revenue company.” Pierre Omidyar says that when he founded online auction site eBay, he founded it on the notion that people are basically good and can be trusted and that “what eBay has shown is that, in fact, you can trust a complete stranger.” Howard Dean, former Presidential candidate known for his use of the Internet in his campaign and now chair of the Democratic National Committee: “The Internet is the most important democratizing invention since the printing press, 500 years ago.” Chuck Todd, political director of NBC News, comparing Internet use in politics to Microsoft updating its Windows applications, says: “Obama basically is Dean 2.0.”

HOW THE WEB WAS WON ‘FACTOIDS’: Let me start with one that I have referred to in previous MfM’s: According to the New York Times, YouTube in 2007 consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in the year 2000. Just about as startling, YouTube founder Chad Hurley is quoted in the article as saying, “every minute on our site we receive over ten hours of video.” The online porn business generates some $2.8 Billion annually with YouPorn, an amateur porn site not connected to YouTube, getting more traffic than CNN.com. In the so-called dot-com bust, between March 10, 2000 and October 20, 2002, the NASDAQ Composite Index, which lists most technology and Internet companies, lost 78% of its value. Yet in that same time, from 2000 all the way to now, the actual usage of the Internet continued to rise dramatically every year. When eBay went public, its filings showed that Beanie Babies accounted for 8% of the site’s entire inventory. The now famous @ sign which is so much a part of our world came about simply because one of the early developers realized it was the least used symbol on keyboards. The global cost of combating unwanted e-mails will reach $140 Billion in 2008, according to technology group Ferris Research. The first person indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for creating a worm that was the first significant network attack in 1988 was a 20-year-old Cornell University graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris. He is now a professor of computer sciences at M.I.T., and is quoted in the article as saying, “I’d rather not talk about it – Sorry.”

HOW THE WEB WAS WON ‘THOUGHTS’: Elon Musk who helped create the electronic payment service PayPal says he believed the Internet was going to change the very nature of humanity because, “it was like humanity getting a nervous system.” Somewhat less hyperbolic, but no less telling is the point made by Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla that society is always organized around communication channels. Some 200 years ago, it was rivers, sea lanes and mountain passes. Now it’s the Internet which is the community channel and “communication always changes society.” Gina Bianchini, C-E-O and co-founder of social networking system Ning, argues that it takes a decade or more for people to figure out the “native behavior” of any new medium. For the first 15 years of television, she argues, they were actually filming radio shows. In the same way we are only now discovering the “native behavior” of the Internet – behavior which, she believes, is social and all about two-way communication.

FINALLY: The article makes the point that ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and therefore ARPAnet was created in the 1950’s in response to national security concerns about the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. Remember Bob Taylor who had the run-in with AT&T and who created packet switching? He said when he had his “Eureka” moment, he went to the head of ARPA, told him about it, and a budget change was made, switching over a Million dollars from one department to another, all in the space of 20 minutes. That’s because at ARPA, says Leonard Kleinrock, “The culture was one of: you find a good scientist. Fund him. Leave him alone. Don’t over manage.” In “The Last Word” section of the article, writers Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb note that In October of this year the ‘nation’s newest military endeavor,’ the United States Air Force Cyber Command, will start up with 8,000 people, mostly physicists, computer scientists and electrical engineers to protect against cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals.

DISCLAIMER: As I said, I devoted this week’s edition of MfM to the one article. I thought it was that good. But I would encourage you to carve out the time and read the whole article. Having read the MfM distillation, I believe you will find the article even more interesting. And it is all available online at the website: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/07/internet200807


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