The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 110

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The man, or overgrown kid, most responsible for Mosaic was a gentle but intense undergraduate named Marc Andreessen, a corn-fed six-foot-four jolly giant born in Iowa in 1971 and raised in Wisconsin. Andreessen was a fan of the pioneers of the Internet, and their writings inspired him: “When I got a copy of Vannevar Bush’s ‘As We May Think,’ I said to myself, ‘Yep, there it is! He figured it out!’ Bush envisioned the Internet as fully as you could, given that you didn’t have digital computers. He and Charles Babbage are in the same league.” Another hero was Doug Engelbart. “His lab was node four on the Internet, which was like having the fourth telephone in the world. He had the amazing foresight to understand what the Internet would be before it got built.”³⁶

When Andreessen saw the Web demonstrated in November 1992, he was blown away. So he enlisted an NCSA staffer, Eric Bina, a first-class programmer, to partner with him in building a more exciting browser. They loved Berners-Lee’s concepts, but they thought CERN’s implementation software was drab and devoid of cool features. “If someone were to build the right browser and server, that would be really interesting,” Andreessen told Bina. “We can run with this and really make it work.”³⁷

For two months they engaged in a programming binge that rivaled those of Bill Gates and Paul Allen. For three or four days straight they would code around the clock—Andreessen fueled by milk and cookies, Bina by Skittles and Mountain Dew—and then crash for a full day to recover. They were a great team: Bina was a methodical programmer, Andreessen a product-driven visionary.³⁸

On January 23, 1993, with just a little more fanfare than Berners-Lee had indulged in when launching the Web, [email protected] announced Mosaic on the www-talk Internet newsgroup. “By the power vested in me by nobody in particular,” Andreessen began, “alpha/beta version 0.5 of NCSA’s Motif-based networked information systems and World Wide Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released.” BernersLee, who was initially pleased, posted a response two days later: “Brilliant! Every new browser is sexier than the last.” He added it to the growing list of browsers available for download from info.cern.ch.³⁹

Mosaic was popular because it could be installed simply and enabled images to be embedded in Web pages. But it became even more popular because Andreessen knew one of the secrets of digital-age entrepreneurs: he fanatically heeded user feedback and spent time on Internet newsgroups soaking up suggestions and complaints. Then he persistently released updated versions. “It was amazing to launch a product and get immediate feedback,” he enthused. “What I got out of that feedback loop was an instant sense of what was working and what wasn’t.”⁴⁰

Andreessen’s focus on continual improvement impressed Berners-Lee: “You’d send him a bug report and then two hours later he’d mail you a fix.”⁴¹ Years later, as a venture capitalist, Andreessen made a rule of favoring startups whose founders focused on running code and customer service rather than charts and presentations. “The former are the ones who become the trillion-dollar companies,” he said.⁴²

There was something about Andreessen’s browser, however, that disappointed and then began to annoy Berners-Lee. It was beautiful, even dazzling, but Andreessen’s emphasis was on enabling rich media for publishing eye-catching pages, and Berners-Lee felt that the focus should instead be on providing tools that would facilitate serious collaboration. So in March 1993, after a meeting in Chicago, he drove “across the seemingly interminable cornfields” of central Illinois to visit Andreessen and Bina at NCSA.

It was not a pleasant session. “All of my earlier meetings with browser developers had been meetings of minds,” Berners-Lee recalled. “But this one had a strange tension to it.” He felt that the Mosaic developers, who had their own public relations staff and were garnering a lot of publicity, were “attempting to portray themselves as the center of Web development and to basically rename the Web as Mosaic.”⁴³ They seemed to be trying to own the Web, he thought, and perhaps profit from it.^II

Andreessen found Berners-Lee’s recollection amusing. “When Tim came, it was more of a state visit than a working session. The Web had already become a brush fire, and he was uncomfortable that he was no longer controlling it.” Berners-Lee’s opposition to embedding images struck him as quaint and purist. “He only wanted text,” Andreessen remembered. “He specifically didn’t want magazines. He had a very pure vision. He basically wanted it used for scientific papers. His view was that images are the first step on the road to hell. And the road to hell is multimedia content and magazines, garishness and games and consumer stuff.” Because he was customer-focused, Andreessen thought that this was academic hogwash. “I’m a Midwestern tinkerer type. If people want images, they get images. Bring it on.”⁴⁴

Berners-Lee’s more fundamental criticism was that by focusing on fancy display features, such as multimedia and ornamental fonts, Andreessen was ignoring a capability that should have been in the browser: editing tools that would allow users to interact with and contribute to the content on a Web page. The emphasis on display rather than editing tools nudged the Web into becoming a publishing platform for people who had servers rather than a place for collaboration and shared creativity. “I was disappointed that Marc didn’t put editing tools in Mosaic,” Berners-Lee said. “If there had been more of an attitude of using the Web as a collaborative medium rather than a publishing medium, then I think it would be much more powerful today.”⁴⁵

Early versions of Mosaic did have a “collaborate” button, which allowed users to download a document, work on it, and repost it. But the browser was not a full-fledged editor, and Andreessen felt it was impractical to turn it into one. “I was amazed at this near-universal disdain for creating an editor,” complained Berners-Lee. “Without a hypertext editor, people would not have the tools to really use the Web as an intimate collaborative medium. Browsers would let them find and share information, but they could not work together intuitively.”⁴⁶ To some extent, he was right. Despite the astonishing success of the Web, the world would have been a more interesting place if the Web had been bred as a more collaborative medium.

Berners-Lee also paid a visit to Ted Nelson, who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. Twenty-five years earlier, Nelson had pioneered the concept of a hypertext network with his proposed Xanadu project. It was a pleasant meeting, but Nelson was annoyed that the Web lacked key elements of Xanadu.⁴⁷ He believed that a hypertext network should have two-way links, which would require the approval of both the person creating the link and the person whose page was being linked to. Such a system would have the side benefit of enabling micropayments to content producers. “HTML is precisely what we were trying to prevent—ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management,” Nelson later lamented.⁴⁸

Had Nelson’s system of two-way links prevailed, it would have been possible to meter the use of links and allow small automatic payments to accrue to those who produced the content that was used. The entire business of publishing and journalism and blogging would have turned out differently. Producers of digital content could have been compensated in an easy, frictionless manner, permitting a variety of revenue models, including ones that did not depend on being beholden solely to advertisers. Instead the Web became a realm where aggregators could make more money than content producers. Journalists at both big media companies and little blogging sites had fewer options for getting paid. As Jaron Lanier, the author of Who Owns the Future?, has argued, “The whole business of using advertising to fund communication on the Internet is inherently self-destructive. If you have universal backlinks, you have a basis for micropayments from somebody’s information that’s useful to somebody else.”⁴⁹ But a system of two-way links and micropayments would have required some central coordination and made it hard for the Web to spread wildly, so Berners-Lee resisted the idea.

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