The value of outside-in technologies is often unclear before their invention—and may remain so for many years afterward. The web started out half-baked when Tim Berners-Lee concocted it at a Swiss physics lab in 1989, but it grew exponentially as it attracted developers and entrepreneurs who saw its potential. As my technologist friend Sep Kamvar jokes, if you asked people at that time what they needed to make their life better, they likely wouldn’t have said a decentralized network of information nodes that are linked using hypertext. And yet, in retrospect, that’s exactly what they needed.
Dixon, Chris. Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet (pp. 53-54). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Then—pop!—the bubble burst. Stocks tanked across the board. In 2001, Amazon’s share price hit an all-time low.5 The retailer’s market cap reached a nadir of $2.2 billion (less than half a percent of what it is today). When the Pew Research Center, a prominent polling firm, asked Americans in October 2002 if they would adopt broadband,6 the majority said no. People mostly used the internet for email and web “surfing.” Did it really need to be faster? The mainstream consensus was that the internet was cool, sure, but it had limited uses and probably wasn’t a good place to build a livelihood. The market crash proved that.
Dixon, Chris. Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet (p. 29). (Function). Kindle Edition.
