A memoir of the dotcom goldrush
I don't look at source code that much any more, unless it's to fix a layout problem in one of the blogs I work on. I'm a full-time content guy again, dealing in words and pictures fresh off the vine – the ingredients, the consumable innards, of books and magazines and websites.
Being a content guy again means rarely having to be in meetings where the chief concerns are when to schedule more meetings and plan more plans; where people can be amazingly efficient with language, as in, "Dude, we gotta calendar those deliverables," and just as amazingly unproductive when it comes to delivering.
But for a heady, weird half-decade from 1995 to 2000, I was part of the real bleeding edge where, in many new companies, substance took a back seat to the staking out of turf in the new world of the Internet, and where some of the real geniuses of technology – the programmers in the engine room – changed the world forever. What a time it was.
Innocents
In the mid-1990s, the owners of the magazines for which I wrote decided that they needed to get in on this Internet Thing. As publishers with a long history of distributing words and pictures on paper, they'd been sensing an important sea-change, but had no idea what to do about it. Could they make money with it? Could they save money? Could they save time and effort? Was it a threat to their business? To their credit, they admitted their ignorance. Unfortunately they then went out and hired consultants to advise them.
Back then, the sudden bloom of Internet consultants and developers contained quite a few poseurs with only a faint understanding of what the Internet was physically composed of, who really used it, what its strengths and weaknesses were, or even how hypertext worked. Having never worked in HTML themselves, they had no idea how much time, effort, and money it took to build a website. But they were well aware of one crucial thing: almost no one in the business world knew more than they did. So they managed to get one step ahead of the people they were advising, and that was all they needed in order to charge fees that would make a pirate blush.
Their advice boiled down to a choice among three levels of commitment: jump in with both feet (because This Internet Thing is coming on fast, and if you don't stay ahead of the curve, you'll lose ), stick your toes in one at a time and see how it feels, or stay out as long as possible and see who floats and who sinks.
The sense of urgency about how much and how soon to get involved rose and fell according to inchoate impressions and rumors. Naturally, business owners wanted their consultants to explain how the Internet could contribute directly to the bottom line. They wanted real numbers, profit-and-loss projections, business plans. So the consultants went ahead with their spreadsheets and presentations, and eventually came up with all sorts of attractive packages based entirely on pie-in-the-sky numbers: They had no idea how many people would visit the websites they were pitching, or what the people would click on or what they'd buy or how they'd buy it, or who the competition would be, or what technology would be available in six months. Back in 1995, business leaders were demanding five-year plans for Internet involvement. This was about as realistic as asking for a 500-year plan in any other business. Of course no one knew that: It was all guesswork, and not even educated guesswork because there were no textbooks, no experienced teachers, no history to learn from.
The progress of Internet commerce and technology has been so astoundingly fast that, with very few exceptions, people who were involved in it in 1995 now look back and just chuckle at the work they did back then, and how it turned out.
Donning the Robes
Once the magazines' owners decided that they needed someone on staff to handle Internet matters, they decided I'd fit the bill : "Hey, you know about computers. We'll make you webmaster."
I didn't know all that much about computers; I'd spent hundreds of hours over the years tinkering with computers as a way of avoiding writing. I'd also managed, in about 1989, to hook up a 2400-baud modem to my machine and open communications with the online world. It wasn't a very big world back then. But everything's relative; in the scheme of things as they were, I was the expert.
The magazine owners had decided to jump in with both feet. They set a big budget to send all the magazines under their aegis into the online world. I was made the "producer" for two magazines – this was intended to be a somewhat more buttoned-down title than "webmaster," which didn't sit well with the businesspeople. Too strange a word – it reeked of science fiction.
My fellow producers and I had a very smart boss, who provided a buffer between us and the moguls at the top who were calling the shots. He was a bit older, had more experience in most facets of the magazine industry, had better business acumen, and was a quick study when it came to computers and the Internet. But it soon became apparent that much of his day was spent fishing around in a stew of indecision and ignorance up among the moguls, and then trying to provide direction, inspiration, or even a sensible task list to those of us who had been brought in to address an urgent business situation.
We producers were told that we wouldn't have to be involved in any programming or coding. We'd have technicians for that. Nor would we need to worry about art or design issues – we'd have electronic artists and designers for that. All we had to do was "produce" the websites – organize online chats, decide which articles would be published electronically, oversee layout, set up budgets, and support our fellow producers.
Six or seven months later, after the company had spent a ton of money on ludicrous advice from consultants, juggled negotiations for content with America Online and the infant Microsoft Network, been stiffed and stymied left and right, stumbled into the pitfalls of electronic copyright law, and generally flailed itself into a state of complete befuddlement about the Internet, we producers still had no technicians or artists, nothing scheduled, nothing gained. Meanwhile a bunch of sites were up and running strongly. Companies were staking out claims. Domain names were being grabbed up. So we decided we'd better learn HTML and make some websites.
After staring doubtfully at my HTML how-to book for a week or so, I picked it up and started reading. I hit a conceptual lump or two, but by the end of the day I understood the basics of HTML and the enormity of the flim-flam going on in business. The stuff was so easy that to this day I shake my head in wonder. People were charging ignorant company executives tens of thousands of dollars for work that was worth a few hundred. The ratios were that loopy, and the bigger and more ignorant the company, the bigger the bilking. In a year or so, with little or nothing to show for their investments, business executives all over the country were like maddened leviathans among the sharks.
Back in the Day
The winter of '96 was still the Dark Age of the commercial Internet (as distinct from the original Internet – the one designed by and for scientists and military people) and most people back then learned HTML the hard way, which as I've said wasn't very hard. Hypertext Markup Language isn't much more complicated than a typesetting code. It can do a lot more than a typesetting code, but the basic logic is simple: With a particular set of characters from my keyboard I'm telling you to start something, and with another set of characters I'm telling you to stop. That's it. HTML is also a bit like chess – while it's easy to learn, you can make it as complex and, I daresay, as creative as you like. I got good at hand-coding web pages, and of course now I get crotchety when someone tells me they've made a website and I know they've never seen a line of the code behind it.
I made two related sites in the winter of '96, and expanded and refined them for a couple of years after that. Along the way I learned some PERL (enough to copy and adjust freeware and shareware scripts) and some UNIX (enough to find my way around the server) and sharpened some peripheral skills that enabled me to work better with photos and illustrations and colors, make animations, build forms, and so on. I learned something about the different browsers and their different versions. I learned the difference between clean, elegant, flexible code and tangled, ugly code. I found out who was an expert and who was a charlatan. I knew where to go for help. These were most of the skills that the amorphous title "webmaster" encompassed back then. The more adept I became, the more I liked that title and the less I liked "producer," which implied to me an alignment with business managers who persisted in thinking about the Internet in ways that were increasingly out-of-touch and even delusional, while refusing to take the simplest step toward understanding what it all really might be about.
I knew I was getting into trouble when I grabbed Matt Wright's PERL/CGI Cookbook to look something up before bed, and ended up reading it almost front to back through the night, grunting and making margin notes. But I never seriously considered becoming a techie. I was too old – almost 40 at the time. Matt Wright, when he wrote most of his famous freeware PERL scripts, was 16.
Today, personal computers are powerful enough, and Internet connections fast enough, to run big batches of ugly code without anyone knowing the difference. No longer does the webmaster walk into his garden to transplant and weed by hand – everything's automatic, instantly updated, comprehensively cataloged, analyzed, and reported – that is, if the program works right and there's actually some content lodged in the database. How many times have you been to a database-driven site and clicked endlessly through pull-down lists (Pitchforks ->Make & Model -> Curved Tines -> Maroon -> EZ grips -> American Gothic Edition…) only to be led into a dead-end alley and sapped with a cheerful message: "Sorry, we're showing no items that match your query. Try again!"
Mine were niche sites, heavy on content and community, low on fancy stuff. I combined them into one big site halfway through my tenure, and by the time I left it was getting between 20,000 and 30,000 visits a week, which was good for a niche site back then. But they weren't making a cent. The magazine publishers hadn't figured out how to combine display and classified ads with an ad program for the website without undercutting their clients' budgets and their own commission structure. The time they needed to line up nickel-and-dime web advertising and promotion was better spent trying to nail down multi-thousand-dollar page packages. Everyone liked the website, but it was more of an extravagance than a potential revenue center at that point. So they slashed the budget for it and I put it on cruise control and went back to writing for a living. But not for long.
Into the New Fray
One day early in the winter of '98-'99, a guy who had been CEO of a big search-engine site came into our offices to talk about the idea of combining our content with some first-rate technology that he would be putting together in a new company. He spoke the language of magazine publishers, having been one himself, and he wowed us.
A couple of months later I found myself seconded to him as editorial director of the new site, and he and I and a couple of other people were setting up a new office and beginning a new portal site. He hired several vice presidents – one for technology, one for business development, one for marketing. He hired an art director. Then he began to fill in beneath them. By the end of the summer we had about 15 people. With the exception of the art director, who was put to work vetting legal documents and negotiating with media consulting firms, no one else in the company knew anything about the website topic.
We hired and we met. And we met and met and met. And planned. And planned. We spent plenty of money. After about a month, the art director walked out the door with a bemused look and went back to his old job.
Our meetings had taken on a weird dynamic. An example:
Me: Hey, if we really plan to have a site up and running by September, I need to start gathering the content right away.
Boss: No no, we can't have the editor out there gathering hard data by hand. That's all got to be done automatically, or we're sunk. Remember, we're a portal.
Me: Well, OK, but even so, we need some words and pictures for the website.
Boss: Don't you worry about that – that's a New Business Development issue. We'll get all that stuff from our media partners. You just a make a list of all the things you want to gather...
Me: Well, fine, but if I'm there and making a list, I might as well gather the stuff at the same time and then, you see, it will be done.
Boss: No, no, no... you don't understand. We can't have an editor be responsible for gathering content. The editor's job is to pick and choose from content that flows in automatically. That's a Technology issue.
Me (to chief tech officer): How long before we get everything I need flowing in to me automatically?
CTO: I can't tell you that. What we're talking about here is not a trivial bit of programming.
Me: Fine. Then why don't I just go ahead and get a leg up. I have a pretty good idea of the things I need, and where to get them.
Boss: No, no. Hold on. We can't just forge ahead blindly. We need to plan this very carefully because we'll waste precious time scurrying down rat holes. One of the first things we're going to do is line up a battery of focus groups…
Through the Looking Glass
Focus groups are voyeur sessions in which everyone knows there's a performance and an audience. The people paying for the sessions sit in comfortable chairs behind a one-way mirror, eating celery and M&Ms and listening to marketing consultants who know little or nothing of the subject matter ask questions of a bunch of people whose main aim is to earn a few extra bucks at night. The interviewees generally register with the marketing firm by checking off their interests and enthusiasms on a questionnaire. One person, for example, might check off bicycling, gardening, shaving and personal hygiene, extreme sports, macramé and fiber crafts, pet ownership, infant clothing, auto repair, European travel, radio listening habits, kitchen accessories, home-brewed beer, and a couple of dozen others. The more items checked, presumably, the more nights can be spent gabbing for money.
In the case of the focus groups we listened to, it was clear that most of the interviewees had only minimal exposure to the subject . Most would probably never visit a website like the one we were planning. One or two were downright fakes. But we paid a lot of money to listen to them, so we spent a lot of time assimilating their views and planning our site according to what they said. Since what they said covered the entire subject except the parts that interest people who actually cared about it, we were never able to discern a focus from the focus groups. This led to conversations like the following:
VP of Marketing: Hey, great job on the data collection. But I'm a little worried. You're the content guy, and you know everything about the subject, and… I'm just worried that you're gearing everything too much to the expert level, people like yourself. We really need to focus on our target market more.
Me: OK, what's our target market?
VP: Well, it definitely includes the expert group, because that's where we get our respect and reputation. But it's also the, you know, the middle group, the people who are involved but who aren't expert yet – the intermediates. And of course we want the beginners – we need to provide for them, start from the ground up so we can bring them in.
Me: So our target market is everybody?
VP: What?
Me: Our market is absolutely everyone? Where's the target in that plan?
VP: OK, OK, settle down. Yeah, we want to include all the segments so that they can build on each other. That's the model we're working on.
Me: Well, that's fine. The stuff I've gathered actually does cover all the segments – it includes pretty much everything of good quality I can find on the Web. Have you looked at it?
VP: Yeah, some of it, and it looks like it's on the expert level to me.
Me: But you don’t have any interest in the subject, so it would make sense that a lot of it would look expert to you.
VP: I know. That's what I'm saying. If I can't understand it, how's our target market going to understand it?
Me: Wait a second. Our target market at the very least should include people who are interested in the subject.
VP: What? Hey, you're the content guy. Just be careful not to alienate our target market.
Rescued from the Tracks
By mid-summer I was in a panic. The magazine company and the web company had parted ways, and I'd ended up with the web company. (The CEO had told us all that we'd all have to work for a pittance in salary, but not to worry – we'd all be festooned in stock options. Hardship now, Horn-o-Plenty later. In fact, however, it would have taken about five years of raises at my old job to equal the subsistence salary he offered me.) My old colleagues and I waved each other fond farewells. "Write when you strike gold," they said. "Don't forget who your friends are…"
So, I was the content guy for a big website that was supposed to be launched in six weeks, but I was still forbidden to gather content. There was no sign of an automatic solution, because the CTO was in New York hiring people and finding us new temporary office space. There were no new business partners because the VP of New Business Development was still trying to figure out what the CEO wanted her to offer and what to seek in return. I had a production chief with nothing to produce, but that didn't matter because he was always on side assignments with the CEO or CTO. There was still no consensus on what the site should look like and what it should do. The company officers didn't want to be bothered with producing content (too labor-intensive and expensive) but they simultaneously wanted original and fresh material to appear at all times. They wanted to be a portal and a content site simultaneously; they wanted to be all things to all people at all times, but also to stay focused on their core objectives.
It soon became clear that there would be no automatic solution, so the production guy and I began frantically to scrape URLs and graphics from all the sites we'd already visited while making lists for New Business Development. We could at least hand-load the portal – prime the pump, as it were – for launch. Within a few weeks we had a lot of good material. With the deadline looming I wanted to go ahead with the manual labor theme and arrange what we had in a basically static HTML format. It was a retrograde idea in some ways, given the grandiose technological plans we'd been discussing for months. But all we'd done was plan, and here was the deadline, and there was nothing we were trying to do at that point that demanded a database-driven technology. Analogy: A 100-foot ditch needs to be dug in a week. On one hand you've got two strong guys with shovels. On the other hand you have a promise that your custom-made back-hoe, which has been on order for three months, will arrive any day now.
But the deadline stretched and stretched. It had been arbitrary anyway, set by the boss to motivate the troops and give potential investors a point in time at which they could see results. As the investors failed to materialize, the deadline backed sullenly into the future. The tech team developed an "interim" solution to the database problem. Analogy: Your custom-made back-hoe is still on order. In the meantime you can use this snowblower to dig your ditch.
We loaded all the material we'd gathered into the interim database solution, and it behaved very strangely. Things appeared in the wrong places, but would then appear in the right places. But then they'd be repeated, or truncated. Probably about half of what we'd gathered never appeared at all.
By early fall, the CEO had become convinced by the venture capitalists he'd been talking to that we'd never produce enough revenue with the single site to make a go of it. So one day he announced that we were to become a "network of mini-portals." The original site, the one that I'd been hired to provide content for, would be stabilized and neatened up eventually and used as a "proof of concept" for the network. This was a great relief. I was terrified that we'd have to launch the half-baked monstrosity we'd been dragging around, and somehow put on a happy face about it. Now it could sit quietly in the background, unannounced to the world, while we met and hired and planned and planned and planned this new network.
Building Something Loony
We were up to about 30 people by October, and had moved twice. We were in an old industrial space on the sixth floor of a building in midtown Manhattan. The elevators were slow and inscrutable. The floor space, several thousand square feet of varnished hardwood, had been tracked with electrical, telephone, and network conduits, then punctuated with archipelagos of desks, polyurethaned maple veneer over plywood, arranged in workspaces – Es, Hs, and the occasional L. There were no cubicles or even partitions; the space was open except for ductwork-encasing pillars supporting the ceiling. Big windows along the north side of the office let light in from the street.
With the openness came noise. By 10:00 a.m. or so, after the last of the tech team filtered in (having worked, as usual, until 2:00 a.m. and then gone for pizza), there was a constant din of many conversations, phone calls, printers, fax machines, delivery people with dollies and hand-trucks, outside contractors and consultants holding forth on many topics, and, pervading it all, the gnat-like beeping, screeching, dinging, whooping, and buzzing of cell phones and pagers. There were so many of them going off in the open space that it was hard to tell them apart. Some people set their phones to play digital ditties instead of ringing, so the cacophony was augmented by tinny versions of Bach Inventions, baseball theme songs, and reggae.
The antidote to multiple sounds was the single sound – most of us had headphones plugged into the jacks of our computers, and listened to CDs or MP3s.
Almost everyone in the company, with the exception of the technicians, me, and the few people who did the actual work, were media and marketing specialists. Their talents were 1) meeting to talk about what needed to be done 2) making charts and graphs and 3) assigning deadlines to others.
Here's how it worked: Upon the discovery, after the chart and graph production, that there was work to be done, the reaction of the senior marketing person was to hire a junior marketing person to see that the work got done. So the junior marketing person would come in and make another set of charts and graphs, and then, face-to-face with the unpleasant fact that work (as opposed to the recognition of work and the definition of work) was at hand, would assure the senior marketing person that there was a great deal of heads-down, in-the-trenches labor ahead, and that a "producer" should be hired to really get down on the work level and make sure that it got done. So the producer would be hired, and would immediately set to work making a new set of charts and graphs. He or she would then discover that the work-flow had been badly managed, and that in order for the work to get done there needed to be a really sophisticated efficiency-control scheme with real accountability and real deadlines, with all dependencies well defined. But even before he or she could panic at the thought of having to find a job title for the person now needed to do that work, there'd be a flurry at the top: Now there would be an Operations Manager/ Master Planner, who would collect and coordinate all plans in all departments. He or she would in turn report to the new Chief Operating Officer, whose first order of business would be to call for new sets of charts and graphs to represent where we were, where we were going, and how we were going to get there.
The process of creating an inefficient bureaucracy from scratch can take months.
The CEO, throughout those months, had always been a fabulous speaker. He'd made his living in schmoozing and sales, and he was truly amazing. He'd speak to you and get you all fired up, and five minutes later you’d be scratching your head and trying to remember what he'd said that had you so excited. After you heard him a few times, you could tell when he was on Auto-Schmooze with potential investors, making the same pronouncements and pitches over and over again, but with appropriate variations and apparently boundless levels of energy and enthusiasm. Sometimes when he was on Auto-Schmooze a new idea would occur to him and he'd light up even brighter.
The trouble was, he almost always spoke hyperbolically, whether to investors or employees. Each statement seemed of utmost importance. Eventually, of course, this had the effect of the wolf warning: after the hundredth time he told you that what he was saying right at that moment was absolutely vital, and took precedence over everything anyone had ever said, you became a bit leery. He regularly said things like: "If there's ONE thing about the design of these sites that's absolutely vital, that will MAKE US or BREAK US in the marketplace, it's [fill in here]." But that one vital thing would be quickly subverted and cast aside by his next pronouncement. Or he'd have a meeting and say, "People, I'm going to say this again and again, until it becomes a company mantra: [fill in here]." And that would be the last we'd hear of it.
He continually shifted the focus of the team to suit his latest notion, or to please a potential investor, so that the whole project was a cobbled-together, teetering pile of sticks that no one could recognize as a distinct structure. Potential investors came and went, making requests and suggestions, and the whole stick pile shifted again. But when the money didn't flow in, he'd say, "It's amazing – they just don't get it." We were a chameleon company with a chameleon product.
This Time For Sure
By the end of the year we were up to about 45 people. That was on a given day – the revolving door was spinning so fast now that new people were only sporadically introduced when they arrived or bidden farewell when they left. This got to be a bit spooky sometimes. You'd turn around to say good morning to your new colleague Sanjay, and there would be no trace of him. Fifteen minutes later you'd hear a chair squeak and look around to see someone even newer in Sanjay's chair, registering a new network username and password. And over the weekend, that person would disappear, so that after a while you just didn't bother to look around.
No amount of schmoozing had fully convinced the venture capitalists that the "network of mini-portals" was going to work. So one day, suddenly, we declared ourselves a software company. Our engineers had developed a Java-based program to help us create the mini-portals, and it was this program we were going to exploit.
The CEO pitched the application as a brilliantly revolutionary, even visionary leap that would forever transform the way information on the Web was accessed and perceived, and would also consolidate and apportion revenue streams in ways that could never have been accomplished before. And lo, he pitched a strike, and the venture capital money flowed in. There was jubilation in the ranks.
In fact it was a clever bit of software – not perhaps, the Universal Solvent, but a nice amalgam of a couple of established technologies, with a new twist or two. It was worthy. Unfortunately, after it left the hands of the engineers, it went into the hands of the marketers and media specialists. They weren't entirely sure what the software tool did and did not do, but that did not worry them: whatever it was, they had to analyze, target, get eyeballs, cross-brand, outsource, add value, splash, and above all, gaze at their Palm Pilots (remember them?). Example conversation:
Bob: "Dude, where you been? We had a nine together."
Tim (checking his Palm Pilot): "No way, man. We have an eleven together. You had a nine with Tracy."
Bob (checking his own Palm): "Whoa. My bad, dude. But Tracy's like, totally under my radar."
Tim: "I know, dude, I really wanted her to go through all the usability stuff. So just get her to do a brain dump for you on the other survey metrics. I'd rather have you own that anyway.
Bob: "Awesome. OK, and I'd like to get Melanie's input on that. I'm still not totally comfortable with it.
Tim: "Dude, that's like, a huge deliverable. Are you sure you can handle it? Maybe we should outsource it."
Bob: "Well… that would actually be completely awesome. That would free me up to really drill down into the survey metrics. We really need to compare the stuff we got from SmallBack to what Allana produced in-house before she left. I mean, we really need to know the delta there.
Tim: "OK, cool. I just really want to get this on a go-forward basis. Seriously, man. I don't care who owns it, but let's get it moving.
Bob: "No problem, I'll draw up a list of includes that we need for analysis, and I'll definitely touch base with Melanie on that."
Tim: "Cool. Let's sync up at our four, just to make sure we're on the same page."
Most of them were in their middle to late 20s. Some had been to business school. Many had been in the right place at the right time in the early days of the commercial Internet, and they'd walked away rich and looking smart as hell. Born on third base and thought they'd hit triples.
What they knew about, or claimed to know about, was consumerism and consumer products. So they decided to go after companies and websites that had things to sell, or advice about things to sell. Our software, they tried to convince everyone, would help organize consumer information much better than it had ever been organized before.
It was a logical enough plan when separated from the fact that using this software to organize consumer information was like flipping eggs with a chainsaw. Worse, it was never possible to define clearly what we really wanted to do with the tool, because we spent so much time gassing about all the snazzy metrics and "interim" facades and trompes l'oeils we were going to use to attract clients to the software in the first place. Remember the Indiana Jones movie where he's in the bazaar and comes up against the assassin in the black robes? The assassin makes a big show of how fearsome he is with his scimitars flashing and twirling marvelously, and feels mighty confident and proud of himself, and then Jones pulls out a gun and shoots him. We were, at that point, the guy with the scimitars.
What the software would have been good for, and should have been sold to do, was to organize deep troves of proprietary information in companies that build complex objects, like Boeing, or in institutions where people study complex objects, like Johns Hopkins Medical School – places where people on staff who were knowledgeable about the subject at hand could spend the large amount of time and do the large amount of work necessary to load the program with data that would benefit from its way of organizing things, and then let it do its thing.
But that's not who we knew, or how we did our thing.
The Engine Room
While the marketing and sales people rarely came into contact with the technical squad, the team I worked on did. We were called "Production." It was our job to use the software to make demonstrations for the consumer companies and websites, and to log problems and user-interface issues with the program. It was a frustrating job before the software was stabilized, because we lost a great deal of our work, but at least we occasionally made something that could be seen, and that gave us proof of our existence.
The technical people – Java and XML programmers, network administrators, project engineers, quality-assurance specialists – were for the most part friendly and straightforward people. Some had big egos, and as far as I could tell, deserved to. The HTML/UNIX guy who shared my half of an H was a very talented and entertaining guy. One day, after he got tired of looking for the information online, he got out a pad of paper and pen and devised an equation that would give him the binary equivalent for each of the 256 colors available in a computer screen's basic color mode. After a few minutes of mumbling and scribbling he said "Hot damn. It worked. Sometimes I wish I were you, just so I could hang around with me.”
Some of these technical people were at the cutting edge of their trade – true boffins. The working vocabulary of the programmer elite is not always something a mere words-and-pictures guy can perch upon comfortably. But it's amazing how a bright, logical person with a decent vocabulary can make complex topics understood, and my time spent in the briefings and bull sessions of the tech group in those months stands out as an amazing career moment. They talked in practical terms about breaking into the Next Beyond – the place where what was once science fiction was close to becoming a reality.
Code Breaking Ground
The best tech conversations in our office in the winter of '99-'00 were about Open Source and the idea that "The Network is the Computer," meaning that the day was coming when peer-to-peer connections would replace the system where big servers and portals were like hubs in the wheels of computing life, and that we all would become individual nodes in a vast freeform communication and computing machine. These concepts are closely related anyway; both go strongly against the status quo, and each supports and sustains the other. Open Source (also called Open Code, but not always with identical meanings) is what it sounds like – it's any computer code, any language or batch of script, that is developed free for people to use, tinker with, and further develop. HTML and Java script are good examples. A closed code is something like Microsoft's operating system – it's not meant to be touched or even inspected by anyone else, it's developed in secret, it's protected by every copyright and patent in the book, and when it gets improved, Microsoft engineers alone do the improving. Microsoft licenses the use of each copy of the operating system, and that's why Bill Gates and quite a few other Microsoft employees are so very wealthy. Big Business likes this idea – proprietary code, written by company employees, for the company. Open Source, on the other hand, makes no sense at all. It's unpredictable, impossible to control, even anarchic. Worst of all, where's the money? Who the hell gets the money??
Most serious programmers are a bit iconoclastic, and many are artists; Open Source lets them work with like-minded people and develop ideas that challenge the status quo. (I'm speaking here of white-hat programmers, not hackers, who are mainly just clever vandals and thugs, or script bunnies, who want to be clever thugs but aren't intelligent enough.)
An Open Source analogy: Thousands of years ago, the Greeks, who lived in a beautiful but barren and rocky land, needed to trade with other places around the Mediterranean. So those who knew something about mathematics and the craft of navigation taught it to everybody in the demos, from captain to deckhand, and the Greeks became seafarers and traders and cosmopolitan dudes of the world. Meanwhile, in Egypt, the high priests, who also knew something about mathematics and astronomy, kept the information to themselves so they could predict eclipses, amaze and frighten the citizens, and keep power to themselves. This didn't serve Egypt well.
The Greek Chorus behind the Open Source discussions where I worked sang of the emergence and quick rise of the LINUX operating system, the Microsoft anti-trust case, the music industry's lawsuit against Napster, and, always, peer-to-peer communications, where every person could be a node in a grand egalitarian enterprise. And I'm sure a lot of those brilliant programmers, with no clear direction about what they were supposed to be doing, spent some venture-capitalized time making the Internet what it is today. Some of their names are legendary in the industry.
Meanwhile, my title of "editorial director" had become obsolete, because the point now was not to produce any original content, but to scrape content from other sites and create links that would forever return visitors to our site, making it sticky. So I was reduced to spending most of my time surfing the Internet for links to plug into our database to make demonstrations to impress more venture capitalists to get more money. After a few weeks as façade plasterer I was offered a job back in the magazine world, and quietly joined the ranks of the departing.
Soon after I left New York, there arose a website called fuckedcompany.com that chronicled the demise of site after site, company after company, providing message boards for livid ex-employees and outside hecklers to throw electronic offal at the beleaguered CEOs and their venture capitalist stooges. Goodness, the things people will say.
Into the Sunset
My brief career as a software developer aside, I've always been a content guy, and I was glad to get back to the world I knew better. Except that it would never be the same, really. I had been given a dizzying view of the future, and I still wanted to be there, this time with brain-fresh words and pictures. And hell, sound and video for that matter.
As everybody knows, paper publications are at a crossroads. Newspapers, magazines, books – they're all suffering. The last thing to be diminished, probably, will be catalogs and junk mail. Too bad. But the good news is that as the Internet has matured, content has come back, and there's a place at the table for people like me.
Content guys have always needed to work closely with those responsible for business matters – even more closely than a magazine editor would normally work with ad sales people, because the website is a tool extremely well-suited to delivering services and statistics to clients. I have no problem with that, because with maturity comes a renewed and healthy separation between church and state. During the first boom of the dotcoms, that separation was entirely bridged, with words and pictures in the bigger commercial sites having to pass through the filters of Marketing and Branding, BizDev, E-Commerce Development, Usability Statistics and Metrics – most of the disciplines that business school grads swarmed into dotcoms to practice. Anyone who visited those sites had a sensation of being cookied to smithereens and sold instantly down the river to a BizDev partner. The "content" was only bait.
Now that the tide has changed, marketing and usability people no longer rule the whole roost — there never were many nutrients in their stew. Content has returned, and we can look back in bemusement at the days of the dotcom gold-rush boom-bust the way, someday, we may be able to look at the real-estate and finance boom-bust-booms of this age and other flashes of idiocy like the Tulip Mania of the 1600s or the South Sea Bubble in the 1700s.
But of course once the froth receded, the items with weight and substance – Google, Amazon, and a dozen other big players – remained on the beach and flourished. Alongside them grew the network players, software players, hardware players, and pioneer storefronts. From them, with them, the commercial web as we know it coalesced. And in a few short years that mewling, puking toddler has grown into an adolescent of considerable promise.
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