The History of the Internet Continued

Watching The History of the Web in the beginning of the semester was very interesting, yet it did not cover the latest innovations and creations on the internet. A lot has happened in the last decade or two and Download: The True Story of the Internet tries to bridge the gap and fill in important background information on influential tech companies and how they came into existence. It is a four part series hosted by journalist John Heileman.

Browser Wars deals with the rise of Netscape and the subsequent battle with Microsoft to be the number one browser used by consumers. Early on, the web was full of code that was difficult to navigate and unattractive to look at. Marc Andreesen had an early vision that everyone would eventually use the web as part of everyday life. With that vision in mind, he created Mosaic in the fall of 1993, the world's first graphical web browser. It went viral, but to continue the growth it needed cash, and Jim Clark joined Andreesen and his vision. What I found particularly interesting was that at this point Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, did not really grasp the importance of browsers and the web in general and only paid attention to Netscape, the company subsequently founded by Andreesen and Clark, once he saw their success and feared competition.

Netscape Navigator was released in 1994 and after its success it was impossible for Gates to ignore the company and the importance of the web. In 1995 a meeting was held between people from Microsoft and Netscape in which Microsoft allegedly offered $1 million for the whole business. This essentially broke US Antitrust Law and it was interesting to see that apparently Gates did not shy away from any methods to keep his company in first place. Eventually Microsoft launched its own browser, Internet Explorer, and using its vast amounts of cash, offered it free to the public, something Netscape could not afford to do.

With the advantage of capital and man power Microsoft won the browser war and Netscape got acquired by AOL. A lawsuit was filed against the computer giant, but an order to split Microsoft in half was later overturned.

Search deals with the history of search engines and the rise of companies like Yahoo, Excite and Google. It was interesting that overall the idea for a search engine started when Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo were looking for a way to use the internet to win a fantasy basketball league. Eventually this idea was turned into a company, attracted money from venture capitalists and needed to figure out a way to generate revenue itself. Banner ads were the solution to the problem and were used frequently. Excite was Yahoo's biggest rival. It used more sophisticated technology and was a rudimentary version of a search today. Both companies tried to outdo each other, adding more and more features, but losing track of the actual search capabilities of their sites.

Google was founded by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who used links to pages as an assessment of importance. The most interesting part of this section was the lack of interest and funding Google was experiencing in the beginning. Executives at Excite had the opportunity to buy Google, valued at about $100 billion today, for $1 million, but were not interested. Other search engine companies and numerous venture capitalists also turned Google down. Eventually Andy Bechtolsheim, an investor, wrote Brin and Page a check on the spot for $100,000 and the two secured more money from other angel investors.

Google still had to figure out a way to make money though and the two founders were against banner ads and wanted to use something more user friendly. They came across Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, who had figured out that he can sell keywords and show paid ads that actually might be of interest to the person searching. After a few meetings, which did not produce results, Page and Brin simply released something very similar to what Gross had done, but they separated ads from the organic search results. Gross sued Google and received a settlement.

I enjoyed getting some more information on the history of browsers as well as search engines. It is intriguing that a company like Microsoft, which toppled giants like IBM with innovation, doesn't see the importance of something like the internet until a small start-up shows success. The methods used to get rid of this new competition were unscrupulous and showed how much people in power want to stay there and will do almost anything to preserve their position.

Google did something similar although it was not as big as Microsoft yet. The founders saw something they liked, but couldn't get to an agreement with Gross, so they simply used his ideas and dealt with the lawsuit later. Even though we don't know what happened behind closed doors at meetings between Microsoft and Netscape or Google and Idealab, it is interesting to get some background information on the giants in technology and their beginnings.