History of WWW and a Caution About Prematurely Judging Modern Fintech

April 11, 2018.

What was it like in 1993/4 when the web was new? Turns out the reaction at the time from luminaries was not far from today’s reaction to innovation in Fintech. A story…

This is a twitter thread from April 10, 2018.

Written by Steven Sinofsky - Originally published in this link.

1/ This post made me think of some Internet/Web history that I wanted to share (well, my blockchain friends encouraged me). The thing is, doing a tech tear down is easy…https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec?source=linkShare-45492ffbf1d4-1523376899

When faced with a new technology, approach, tool, API, etc. there’s an almost universal “first reaction” from some people to document all the ways it fails. This is the “tech buzzsaw”. Every single tech I can think of was subject to this. One in particular…

was the Web/Internet. Back in late ’93, early 94 when the corporate tech world was first confronted with these “new” technologies, the first reaction was “there’s no way that this free, university developed, flakey,…network can work”. How did I see this happen?

I was one of a couple of people with a “direct internet tap” (static IP, no NAT yet) in my office exploring the internet (JAllard was another, serving up free MSDOS via FTP). Every day I would invite people to my office to “demo the internet”. It was crazy.

My demos were for leading tech and business luminaries of the time. They would sit and I would show them FTP, Gopher, WAIS, Cello, Mosaic and mtv.com, sun.com, novell.com, first web cam (Norway), and Cornell’s Global Schoolhouse…etc.

Many of these visiting were running companies with dedicated leased lines (x.25!) connecting their global offices. Many used satellites to transmit company video. Many were sending out sales and training data via CDROMs and FedEx (oh, that was Microsoft).

Each would, from their own POV, tear down demos “proving” WWW can’t work. One telco took me through the economics of “shared” lines and fragility TCP/IP. One “multimedia” dev explained “big” music files. Almost all said HTML was too primitive. Plus “communism”. Shall I continue?

But the interesting thing was how to build all of this? The teams were working on all sorts of technologies to enable these scenarios. Lots of tech!

These “WWW” technologies seemed fragile, immature, loosely controlled, and of course no one could benefit economically.

The thing was the smartest people around thought the technologies could never do any of the things shown in these videos.

You can call it innovator’s dilemma or disruption or anything. But what it was really was the basic idea that entrenched technologies *always* do a lot more than new and emerging technologies. That’s just definitional.

What they mean is the new can’t do new things in *old* ways.

At the same time, people in Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) were using these very technologies to make the things in those videos happen.

Reminder, ATT and every other big media and comms company was very busy on their own journey to build out these scenarios using the methods they believed right. ATT Someday You Will…

You can call it innovator’s dilemma or disruption or anything. But what it was really was the basic idea that entrenched technologies *always* do a lot more than new and emerging technologies. That’s just definitional.

What they mean is the new can’t do new things in *old* ways.

Annotation: Several have mentioned that the internet had clear use cases or benefits even in the early days which is different than Bitcoin/etc. I would differ with that. Most people looking at the demos I was doing did not see the immediate value. For example, I showed a live video feed of a classroom (Cornell Global Schoolhouse) and no one saw it as interesting. The mtv.com website was mysterious to people. The head of sales for Microsoft did not see value in Novell (our chief competitor) posting all their documentation on the web and also complained that using x.25 to send powerpoints and training materials to far away subsidiaries was not necessary as we already had a process to package up CDROMs and FedEx them every month. All of this is before talking about commerce/shopping which many were experimenting with (using a combination of offline/online like an MVP — amazon was only a year away from being formed). So from my perspective, these key people did not see “applications” or “use cases”.

At this same time, I visited IBM and was basically lectured for an hour over how the “PC architecture” could never offer “mainframe level” reliability. I was shown redundant power supplies, reliable memory, dual network cards and more to prove this.

But I knew that the people at HP and Dell were busy building “servers” on the PC architecture and NT was being developed to be an OS capable of being reliable too. Same dynamic.

It is natural for existing technology leadership and (yes) power structures to wield the tech or business buzzsaw to play down something new.

It is the feeling of loss of control, loss of expertise, loss of competitive advantage that drives this. Not being evil or anything.

So for me today, when I read opinions of all the best people saying what will and will not work in financial technology, I keep thinking of my little office and my “d-tap” internet line showing industry leaders the “World Wide Web”.

It took a decade and a lot of ups and a really big down and a lot of ideas that didn’t work (streaming, delivery, PDAs) were reinvented and then worked even better than imagined. But these things to happen. These technologies play out over time.

This happens because the problems remained. Leasing comm lines, proprietary protocols and data formats, too much complexity and more needed to be addressed. Yes, these “problems” also brought us the information revolution but also as technologists we know things can be better.

I am not predicting the future based on a pattern of the past. Rather my view is that one should just be really careful when dismissing something new simply because it is “worse”. You just never know. 🙏

PS/ Reminder: at the time, only inner -most circle thought the internet was useful. Aside from thinking it wouldn’t work, most saw no utility in the capability — why would I want a video camera in a classroom? Why would I want “online” sales tools? My customers aren’t “online”.

PPS/ Interested in the concept of “new things in old ways” then check out this post. ♻️ “New Things In New Ways, or Same Old Things In Old Ways?” https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/new-things-in-new-ways-or-same-old-thi