The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 105

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Within a few months, CVC was on the brink of bankruptcy. Von Meister had still not learned to be a prudent manager, and the Atari game market had deflated. When told the sales numbers at a board meeting that year, the venture capitalist Frank Caufield responded, “You would’ve thought they would’ve shoplifted more than that.” So Caufield insisted that a disciplined manager be brought in. The person he tapped was a close friend and classmate from West Point, Jim Kimsey, who had the gruff exterior of a Special Forces commando cloaking the personable heart of a bartender.

Kimsey was not the obvious person to whip into shape an interactive digital service; he was far more familiar with guns and whiskey glasses than keyboards. But he had the mix of tenacity and rebelliousness that makes for a good entrepreneur. Born in 1939, he grew up in Washington, DC, and in his senior year was kicked out of the town’s top Catholic school, Gonzaga High, for being disruptive. Nevertheless, he was eventually able to wrangle an appointment to West Point, where he was suited to an atmosphere that celebrated, channeled, and controlled aggression. Upon graduation, he was deployed to the Dominican Republic, then served two tours in Vietnam in the late 1960s. While there as a major with the Airborne Rangers, he took charge of building an orphanage for a hundred Vietnamese kids. Had it not been for his tendency to mouth off to those higher in the chain of command, he may have made the military a career.²⁷

Instead he went back to Washington in 1970, bought an office building downtown, rented out much of it to brokerage firms, and on the ground floor opened a bar called The Exchange that had a working ticker-tape machine. He soon opened other popular singles bars, with names like Madhatter and Bullfeathers, while embarking on additional real estate ventures. Part of his routine was going on adventure trips with his West Point pal Frank Caufield and their sons. It was on a 1983 rafting trip that Caufield recruited him to CVC as a minder for von Meister and, eventually, as CEO.

Faced with sluggish sales, Kimsey fired most of the staff except for Steve Case, whom he promoted to vice president of marketing. Kimsey had a colorful saloonkeeper’s way with words, especially scatological ones. “My job is to make chicken salad out of chicken shit,” he declared. And he was fond of the old joke about a young boy who merrily digs through a pile of horse manure and, when asked why, declares, “There must be a pony somewhere in this shit.”

It was an odd triumvirate: the undisciplined idea generator von Meister, the coolly strategic Case, and the rough-edged commando Kimsey. While von Meister played showman and Kimsey played backslapping barkeep, Case hovered in the corner observing and coming up with new ideas. Together they showed once again how a diverse team can promote innovation. Ken Novack, an outside counsel, later observed, “It was no accident that they created this business together.”²⁸

Case and von Meister had long been interested in building computer networks that could connect ordinary users. When CBS, Sears, and IBM joined forces in 1984 to launch such a service that became known as Prodigy, other computer makers realized that there might be a real market. Commodore came to CVC and asked it to create an online service. So Kimsey reconfigured CVC into a company called Quantum, which launched a service named Q-Link for Commodore users in November 1985.

For $10 a month, Q-Link had everything that von Meister—who was then being eased out of the company—and Case had envisioned: news, games, weather, horoscopes, reviews, stocks, soap opera updates, a shopping mall, and more, along with the regular crashes and downtime that became endemic in the online world. But most important, Q-Link had an area filled with active bulletin boards and live chat rooms, dubbed People Connection, which enabled members to form communities.

Within two months, by the beginning of 1986, Q-Link had ten thousand members. But growth began to taper off, largely because Commodore’s computer sales were slumping in the face of new competition from Apple and others. “We have to take control of our destiny,” Kimsey told Case.²⁹ It was clear that for Quantum to succeed, it had to create its Link online services for other computer makers, most notably Apple.

With the tenacity that came with his patient personality, Case targeted the executives at Apple. Even after its brilliantly controlling cofounder Steve Jobs had been forced out of the company, at least for the time being, Apple was difficult to partner with. So Case moved across the country to Cupertino and took an apartment near Apple’s headquarters. From there he waged his siege. There were many possible units within Apple he could try to conquer, and he was eventually able to get a little desk inside the company. Despite his reputation for being aloof, he had a whimsical sense of humor; on his desk, he put up a sign that said “Steve Held Hostage”^III along with the number of days he had been there.³⁰ In 1987, after three months of daily campaigning, he was successful: Apple’s customer service department agreed to strike a deal with Quantum for a service called AppleLink. When it launched a year later, the first live chat forum featured Apple’s lovable cofounder Steve Wozniak.

Case went on to make a similar deal with Tandy to launch PC-Link. But he soon realized that his strategy of creating separate private-label services for different computer makers needed to be revised. Users of one service could not connect with those on another. In addition, the computer makers were controlling Quantum’s products, marketing, and future. “Look, we can no longer rely on these partnerships,” Case told his team. “We really need to stand on our own two feet and kind of have our own brand.”³¹

This became a more urgent problem—but also an opportunity—when relations with Apple frayed. “The powers that be at Apple decided they were uncomfortable with a third-party company using the Apple brand name,” Case said. “Apple’s decision to pull the rug out on us led to the need to rebrand.”³² Case and Kimsey decided to combine the users of all three of their services into one integrated online service with a brand name all its own. The software approach pioneered by Bill Gates would apply to the online realm as well: online services would be unbundled from the hardware and would work on all computer platforms.

Now they needed to come up with a name. There were many suggestions, such as Crossroads and Quantum 2000, but they all sounded like religious retreats or mutual funds. Case came up with America Online, which caused many of his colleagues to gag. It was hokey and awkwardly patriotic. But Case liked it. He knew, just as Jobs had when he named his company Apple, that it was important to be, as he later said, “simple, unintimidating, and even a bit sappy.”³³ With no marketing dollars, Case needed a name that clearly described what the service did. And the name America Online accomplished that.

AOL, as it became known, was like going online with training wheels. It was unintimidating and easy to use. Case applied the two lessons he had learned at Proctor & Gamble: make a product simple and launch it with free samples. America was carpet-bombed with software disks offering two months of free service. A voice-over actor named Elwood Edwards, who was the husband of an early employee of AOL, recorded perky greetings—“Welcome!” and “You’ve got mail!”—that made the service seem friendly. So America went online.

As Case understood, the secret sauce was not games or published content; it was a yearning for connection. “Our big bet, even back in 1985, was what we called community,” he recounted. “Now people refer to it as social media. We thought the killer app of the Internet was going to be people. People interacting with people they already knew in new ways that were more convenient, but also people interacting with people they didn’t yet know, but should know because they had some kind of shared interest.”³⁴ Among AOL’s primary offerings were chat rooms, instant messaging, buddy lists, and text messaging. As on The Source, there was news, sports, weather, and horoscopes. But social networking was the focus. “Everything else—commerce and entertainment and financial services—was secondary,” Case said. “We thought community trumped content.”³⁵

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