The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 114
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In January 2001 the cash crisis came to a head. Desperately in need of new servers, Williams made an appeal to Blogger’s users for donations. Close to $17,000 came in, which was enough to buy new hardware but not to pay salaries.69 Hourihan demanded that Williams step aside as CEO, and when he refused, she quit. “On Monday I resigned from the company I co-founded,” she wrote on her blog. “I’m still crying and crying and crying.”70 The other employees, by then six in total, walked out as well.
Williams posted a long entry titled “And Then There Was One” on his own blog. “We are out of money, and I have lost my team. . . . The last two years have been a long, hard, exciting, educational, once-in-a-lifetime, painful, and, ultimately, very rewarding and worthwhile journey for me.” Vowing to keep the service alive, even if he had to do it alone, he ended with a postscript: “If anyone wants to share some office space for a while, lemme know. I could use the cost savings (and the company).”71
Most people would have quit at that point. There was no money for rent, no one to keep the servers running, no sight of any revenue. He also faced painful personal and legal attacks from his former employees, causing him to rack up lawyer’s bills. “The story apparently was that I fired all my friends and I didn’t pay them and took over the company,” he said. “It was really ugly.”72
But ingrained in Williams’s hardscrabble heritage was the patience of a corn farmer and the stubbornness of an entrepreneur. He had an abnormally high level of immunity to frustration. So he persevered, testing that hazy borderline between persistence and cluelessness, remaining placid as problems bombarded him. He would run the company by himself, from his apartment. He would tend to the servers and the coding himself. “I basically went underground and did nothing but try to keep Blogger going.”73 Revenues were close to zero, but he could bring his costs in line with that. As he wrote in his Web posting, “I’m actually in surprisingly good shape. I’m optimistic. (I’m always optimistic.) And I have many, many ideas. (I always have many ideas.)”74
A few people expressed sympathy and offered help, most notably Dan Bricklin, a beloved and collaborative tech leader who had cocreated VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet program. “I didn’t like the idea of Blogger being lost in the dotcom crash,” Bricklin said.75 After reading Williams’s forlorn post, he sent an email asking if there was anything he could do to help. They agreed to meet when Bricklin, who lived in Boston, came to an O’Reilly conference in San Francisco. Over sushi at a nearby restaurant, Bricklin told the tale of how, years earlier, when his own company was foundering, he had run into Mitch Kapor of Lotus. Though competitors, they shared a collaborative hacker ethic, so Kapor offered a deal that helped Bricklin stay personally solvent. Bricklin went on to found a company, Trellix, that made its own website publishing system. Paying forward Kapor’s band-of-hackers helpfulness to a semicompetitor, Bricklin worked out a deal for Trellix to license Blogger’s software for $40,000, thus keeping it alive. Bricklin was, above all, a nice guy.
Throughout 2001 Williams worked around the clock from his apartment or in borrowed space to keep Blogger running. “Everybody I knew just thought I was crazy,” he remembered. The low point came at Christmas when he went to visit his mother, who had moved to Iowa. His site got hacked on Christmas Day. “I was in Iowa trying to assess the damage over a dial-up connection and a tiny laptop. And I didn’t have a system administrator or anyone else working for me at the time. I ended up spending most of the day in a Kinko’s doing damage control.”76
Things began to turn around in 2002. He launched Blogger Pro, which users paid for, and with the help of a new partner got a licensing deal in Brazil. The world of blogging was growing exponentially, which made Blogger a hot commodity. In October, with some prodding from Williams’s old publishing boss, Tim O’Reilly, Google came calling. It was still mainly a search engine and had no history of buying other companies, but it made an offer to buy Blogger. Williams accepted.
Williams’s simple little product helped to democratize publishing. “Push-button publishing for the people” was his mantra. “I love the world of publishing, and I’m fiercely independent minded, both of which came from growing up on a remote farm,” he said. “When I found a way to let people publish on the Internet, I knew I could help give power and voice to millions.”
At least initially, Blogger was primarily a tool for publishing rather than for interactive discussion. “Instead of promoting dialogue, it let people just get on a soap box,” Williams admitted. “The Internet has a community side and a publishing side to it. There are people who obsess about the community part more than I do. I’m more driven by the publishing of knowledge side of it, because I grew up learning about the world from what other people published, and I’m not a huge participant in the community side.”77
However, most digital tools eventually get commandeered for social purposes, that being the nature of humans. The blogosphere evolved into being a community rather than merely a collection of soap boxes. “It ended up turning into a community, even though we all had our own blogs, because we would comment on and link to each other,” Williams said years later. “There was definitely a community there, just as real as any mailing list or bulletin board, and eventually I came to appreciate that.”78
Williams went on to be a cofounder of Twitter, a social networking and micropublishing service, and then Medium, a publishing site designed to promote collaboration and sharing. In the process, he realized that he did indeed value that community aspect of the Internet as much as the publishing side of it. “As a farm boy from Nebraska, connecting and finding a community of like-minded people prior to the Internet was very difficult, and the core desire of connecting with a community is always a part of you. I came to realize, well after I founded Blogger, that it was a tool that served this need. Connecting into a community is one of the basic desires that drive the digital world.”79
WARD CUNNINGHAM, JIMMY WALES, AND WIKIS
When he launched the Web in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee intended it to be used as a collaboration tool, which is why he was dismayed that the Mosaic browser did not give users the ability to edit the Web pages they were viewing. It turned Web surfers into passive consumers of published content. That lapse was partly mitigated by the rise of blogging, which encouraged user-generated content. In 1995 another medium was invented that went further toward facilitating collaboration on the Web. It was called a wiki, and it worked by allowing users to modify Web pages—not by having an editing tool in their browser but by clicking and typing directly onto Web pages that ran wiki software.
The application was developed by Ward Cunningham, another of those congenial Midwest natives (Indiana, in his case) who grew up making ham radios and getting turned on by the global communities they fostered. After graduating from Purdue, he got a job at an electronic equipment company, Tektronix, where he was assigned to keep track of projects, a task similar to what Berners-Lee faced when he went to CERN.
To do this he modified a superb software product developed by one of Apple’s most enchanting innovators, Bill Atkinson. It was called HyperCard, and it allowed users to make their own hyperlinked cards and documents on their computers. Apple had little idea what to do with the software, so at Atkinson’s insistence Apple gave it away free with its computers. It was easy to use, and even kids—especially kids—found ways to make HyperCard stacks of linked pictures and games.
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