Online at the time
ITBusiness.ca
by Shane Schick
8/31/2004 5:00:00 PM - Does the Internet's 35th birthday mark the moment we outgrew innovation?
This is a parlour game that can only be played by a diminishing number of people: when did you first hear about the Internet, and what's the first thing you looked for online?
Since I was still only a glimmer in my mother's eye when Stephen Croker and Vincent Cerf started hooking up computers at UCLA 35 years ago this week, it took until sometime in university before I become acquainted with the defining technology of my generation. I wish I could still remember that first reference, but it was probably something I read about somewhere. I do vaguely recall hearing the phrase "World Wide Web" and wondering if that was something different. My first online experience, however, feels like it happened yesterday -- probably because it's a little embarrassing.
I was working for a career placement firm, and one of my jobs involved researching companies that were going on a hiring spree. I was given limited access to the Internet, but I spent most of my time using CD-ROMs from Dun & Bradstreet. All I knew about the Internet were what people referred to as "bulletin boards," which sounded about as exciting as looking at actual bulletin boards in my parish community centre. When I finally did go online, the slow dialup connection didn't bother me at all. Going on what was soon to be called the information superhighway seemed to me like a significant journey -- it made sense that you would have to wait before you were let in.
Once online, I thought there would be some kind of "front door," or a super-duper splash page that would give me some sense of what there was to see. I had heard of Yahoo!, I think, but the URL was not widely advertised, so I didn't know what it was for. Luckily, someone had worked in this job before me, who had compiled a series of bookmarks linking to sites I needed. This was the primary way I navigated for those first few attempts, and perhaps that's why I couldn't imagine someone surfing for the sheer fun of it. At the time, I probably would have preferred to flip through the contents of a filing cabinet.
Soon enough, of course, I realized you could find other sites using by typing addresses into the browser (this was at about the time I understood that a browser was not the Internet itself, the same way a television is not "television," but only a conduit). This process of discovery was not unlike the one that allowed the Internet to be created in the first place. No one "ordered" the Internet. No one could have conceived an appropriate business case. In fact, another interesting parlour game might be trying to draft a request for proposal for the Internet, with each member playing a well-known company in the IT industry (like Microsoft, for example, who took even longer to figure out the Internet than I did). As a side project hatched by those who would have no idea how it would spread, the Internet is a textbook case in the way the best innovation happens, and why it's so rare.
In some of the coverage of this year's Internet anniversary, some experts worried that further development could be hindered by the mix of pressures from lawmakers, special interest groups and businesses. There's certainly no way anything would get done if every good idea had to pass that many levels of approval, but they don't. Even voice-over-IP, one of the most disruptive technologies of the past five years, hit the market before regulators could possibly catch up.
Like a Hollywood blockbuster, though, companies have looked at the Internet's success and wondered how they could engineer the Next Big Thing. That's why they're building ultra-modern laboratory environments where they hope some breakthroughs will occur. Unfortunately, innovation seldom works that way. The big ideas often come when the inventor not only enjoys some autonomy but is almost ignored by senior management. They excel when they are connected to real-world problems, not isolated in room where only brainstorming is supposed to take place. They tend to deliver when they are not accountable for doing so, when they can focus on the idea rather than its commercial application.
There is an element of subversion in the inventive process that may be hard to encourage in corporate settings where results are prized over anything else. The best way might be for senior executives to harken back to their first encounter with cyberspace -- when all that was possible was to go out there and see what you could do.
August 31, 2004 at 08:18 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink
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