The Commercialization of the Web

I blogged awhile back about my research into the history of the web for the book I am co-authoring with Silvia Cambie on New Trends in International Public Relations. During the Christmas break, I’ve been working on the introductory chapter, developing my research into a coherent story. It starts with Tim Berners-Lee developing the first website in 1991, building on my blog post on that subject. But to get from the first website, a visually unexciting collection of text pages to the social media space of Web 2.0 that we have today is a huge leap.

So I’ve been trying to identify the milestones on the journey from 1991 through to the present day. How did an academic research tool come to change the world?

The key events for this story came together during the mid- to late 1990s.

It was all very well having websites but the processes and technology needed access them in the early days were still complex and time consuming and you needed to understand computer programming language to boot - not the best formula for viral take-up by the public. What was needed was a web browser that was cheap and easy to use. There were a number of attempts within academic and research institutes but the one that really took off was Mosaic developed in 1993 at the University of Illinois by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen. Andreessen then went on to partner up with Jim Clark, former chairman of Silicon Graphics Inc and together they created the Netscape browser, which they gave away to consumers for free via download from the internet. This was the breakthrough browser that brought the World Wide Web to the world outside of academia and research and for a brief moment in history, it looked like Netscape would dominate the way we accesses the internet.

But they had not reckoned on Microsoft. Late in the day - 1995 - Bill Gates realised that his company was missing a trick by chasing interactive television as the next big thing and wrote his now famous “Internet Tidal Wave” memo. It was a clarion call to Microsoft that they could no longer ignore this internet thingy. Within a few months, they were able to bundle the first Internet Explorer browser with their latest Windows software, Windows 95. In just over a year after that, Microsoft overtakes Netscape as the winner of the browser wars with a third of the the market share.

Once Microsoft, with its existing dominance of the overall computer software market, had got in on the game, it was just a matter of time before the web would become mainstream, with access to the internet bundled into every PC that was bought for business or home use and developing products like FrontPage and Publisher, alongside Word that could easily create and upload webpages onto the net. Another bundled product, Outlook Express gave us the means for fast, electronic messaging while Microsoft Messenger offered us instant messaging.

It became so easy to publish a website, send an email, IM someone. It was at this point that the computer started to become an integral part of our daily lives - beyond word-processing, beyond spreadsheets, beyond CD-ROM games: beyond our individual selves. When it became a tool that gave us the ability to reach out beyond our individual studies and households to others out there in the world, that, to me, is when the age of the internet truly began.

Coming up in future posts: how computers got personal and the need for speed.

Photo: thanks to CommandShift3 and Zapfino from flickr.com (CCL)