I’ve been on the Internet since 1979. In 1979 you could draw a map of nearly all the machines on the internet on a piece of paper. So I’ve had the somewhat rare perspective of seeing something that was just a pretty idea evolve into something essential to our everyday lives.
“That’s all very interesting, but show me how we can make money on this” is what a venture capitalist told me in 1990 at a computer show in NYC. I had just said to him that the most interesting thing about the show was not any of the systems or software on display but the fact that most of the systems were connected to each other through the Internet and how engineers were exchanging email. This was a time when few had a computer, let alone a modem, and the software made it inconceivable that most folks could get on the Internet. And if they did there was no Web to see. It was not the time to make money on the Internet
Now in any hotel lobby I’m overwhelmed by the number of folks who are staring into little glowing rectangles and communicating wirelessly to people around the world, built on the same technology.
So the last 12 years are completely watershed as we’ve gone from near zero internet usage on the way to global acceptance. And we’re just figuring out this stuff still. And as we do it, we have our cultural moments and fads, like an art movement. Globally speaking, we don’t know what we want or need but we are figuring it out. We create businesses and non-profit ventures to meet these needs as we recognize them. Some of these ventures are seen as vital and others less so. And I’m reminded of the conversation with VC when it was too early to really to find value. Some things are funded and others not, and it reflects both the zeitgeist and our ability to deliver something practical.
Invention is sometimes characterized as creating something from nothing, but another view is that we find the doors to knowledge that we can break into. The doors have been there forever and are now weak enough that they cannot bar our entrance. That’s how I see these last years, where the implications of an underlying technology are continuously being discovered and we kick our way through rotting doors into new places, feeling our way. But they are the doors that are the easiest to kick in.