I'm in China this week, for SEMICON China, along with 70,000 of my closest friends. That's three times the size of SEMICON West, if anyone is counting. So I'm going to be writing about China all week. This post starts off...not Chinese at all. But it will get there eventually. John Gilmour was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He was also the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems (the first four being Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy, famous names all). And he is not David Gilmour, famous Pink Floyd guitarist. He is also famous for the quote: The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it AOL Before the internet became more than an academic network linking a lot of mainframes at universities, there was an intermediate time when internet service providers (ISPs) didn't just provide an internet link for your router, they provided a whole online experience. The most well-known was AOL (then America Online). It became big by a memorable marketing campaign started in 1993 to sign people up by mailing them CDs with some hours, sometimes as many as 500, of free access provided. This was before broadband, when access was by 56Kb modems (if you used them, you'll get nostalgic about the sound they made when connecting). They didn't just mail them out, they put them in a huge variety of magazines. It became a joke that everything came with an AOL CD. The campaign lasted 13 years (until broadband took over totally). During that time, PC World estimated that AOL sent out over 1 billion CDs. AOL didn't just provide access to the internet, it provided an online service. The browser had not yet been invented. The business model was that you used your AOL CD (and a modem connected to a landline phone) to connect to AOL, who provided you with mail ("You've got mail"), access to music, ringtones, and the first hints of online commerce. This was referred to as a "walled garden". You connected to AOL and you never went anywhere else. When the internet started to become more real (realler? it should be a word like funner that seems to have become one), they provided a little on-ramp, but only weird geeky people were expected to venture into that wild open water, normal people would play around in AOLs garden. Mosaic Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and Marc Andreessen (and his collaborators) invented Mosaic, the first graphical browser (to make HTML usable) and then Netscape, the first commercial browser. In 1995, Bill Gates wrote his famous memo The Internet Tidal Wave that warned Microsoft was going to miss the internet. He sent it to every Microsoft employee. Bill realized that the internet would be big, and Microsoft was not a part of it. When people say that the CEO of a big company doesn't make that much difference, point them to this memo. Or their iPhone. Here is the opening paragraph: Our vision for the last 20 years can be summarized in a succinct way. We saw that exponential improvements in computer capabilities would make great software quite valuable. Our response was to build an organization to deliver the best software products. In the next 20 years the improvement in computer power will be outpaced by the exponential improvements in communications networks. The combination of these elements will have a fundamental impact on work, learning and play. Great software products will be crucial to delivering the benefits of these advances. Both the variety and volume of the software will increase. Why was he so worried? Because after 10 hours of browsing the Internet, he: had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows .EXE, or other Microsoft file format This was all the start of the era of what I think of as the open internet. This was the era when John Gilmour's quote about censorship seemed to be true. The walls of the walled gardens of AOL were broken down, your browser could take you anywhere on the internet. You could even buy stuff if you were brave enough to trust a website (are you insane?) with your credit card number. A company called Yahoo tried to catalog the entire web by hand, making it easy to find things by category. Digital's Alta Vista allowed you to type in any string you wanted and it would do a pretty good job of finding sites that had something to do with what you typed. Some companies saw what was coming and started to have internet strategies. Others were famously slow. Wired Magazine, as a prank, registered mcdonalds.com since McDonald's hadn't bothered, and asked people to send email to ronald@mcdonalds.com with suggestions for what they should do with it. China China didn't exist. Well, of course it existed. But Deng Xiaoping's southern tour, which was after he'd retired from politics, only took place in 1992. This was initially ignored by "Beijing" (airport code PEK, lol), but is generally regarded now as the event that unleashed the wave of entrepreneurship that over the next 25 years would take China to where it is today, a transformation that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty (more than the entire US population), and created the huge new middle class. Chinese friends of mine in the US who felt they had escaped by emigrating to go to college, wonder whether they'd have done better by staying. China has taken a different attitude to the internet. I've spent time in China frustrated that I can't get on Twitter (randomly) or Facebook (ever). If I type something into my URL bar without thinking it does a Google search...blocked (again, not completely, it goes through Google Hong Kong...sort of). Switch to Baidu and it's instantaneous. More on the Great Firewall of China tomorrow. Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.![]()
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