Strategy: Hardware? Software? Service? Partnership?

Let’s take a look at the players in the “smart phones” market: Apple, Nokia, Microsoft, RIM (blackberry),  Linux Mobile, and Palm. Sun used to have a Java Mobile but it seems to have dropped off the market, in terms of device market share. And then, there’s the new pretender to the crown in the form of Google, with its Android OS offering.

How do they stack up in terms of Hardware? Operating System? Service Offering? Well, here goes:

A first glance at this table seems to reflect some of the player’s pre-existing biases. Microsoft is known for its software business so that’s where it put the most weight; Google is all about free software to power their services; RIM and Palm do a hardware software combo; Apple throws its weight behind a fully Apple controlled experience.

However, there are a few caveats: For example, while Microsoft is in the space primarily as a software provider, it also owns Danger Inc., makers of the Hiptop. And while Palm has its own software, many of its devices are powered by Windows Mobile.

But apart from those exception areas, it appears that strategies are organized across four business models:

• OS only: This strategy is preferred by Sun and Linux. The model here is to provide an operating system that can be used by others. For Sun, this strategy has largely failed as substantially less than 1% of all handsets around the world is powered by their OS. Linux, which really was the first open source mobile OS has captured about 4 percent of the global smart phone market to date. Microsoft is the big leader in terms of that strategy, with its Windows Mobile OS currently powering about 12 percent of all smartphones around the globe.
• Software + Service: All this leaves us with Google and their Android offering. Much of the commenting today is that the move Nokia just made was aimed at the fact that Google had an “open” operating system. But what Google is really trying to do is provide an operating system that melds OS and services. Either that or they are in the OS only camp. Either way, they are not playing in the same space as the iPhone or Nokia (see triple play below).
• Hardware + Software: This model is preferred by RIM, makers of the Blackberry, and Palm (especially with their inexpensive Palm Centro line). This strategy works best if you want your device to be focused on few use scenarios: The blackberry is first and foremost a portable email station; Palm devices are first and foremost PDAs. This orientation comes from a past where the device wasn’t initially intended as a phoe but morphed into one.
• The triple play (ie hardware/software/service): This is the strategy currently used by Apple with the iPhone: they provide the hardware, the software, and a set of services (me.com, iTunes, Software store) on a complete package.  Through recent acquisitions, Nokia has been moving in this direction: while they were traditionally a hardware player, they started adding services to their devices. With today’s announcement, they’re also getting some control over software.

So looking at this, it becomes apparent that while many are pointing to Nokia going after Google, it may not be the target. Since Nokia does service and hardware already, getting more control over its own OS is probably an important move.

Open Sourcing

I can already hear some readers snickering: Symbian’s been open-sourced so Nokia does not have control. Let me make something very clear: the gold rule (“he who’s got the gold makes the rule”) applies to Open Source as it does in other areas. While it won’t get exclusivity, Nokia, having paid $400+ million to open source Symbian will be considered “more equal than others” by the Symbian foundation, I’m sure.

But why open source? If we look at the players mentioned above, their position on open source and their market share, the picture becomes clearer:

Looking at the market share date, Nokia’s move doesn’t seem to make sense: They currently control 65 percent of the market, why would they bother? But here’s the thing: There’s this newcomer called Apple and they didn’t exist 18 months ago: they now have 7 percent of the market and are growing.

If I’m a Nokia executive and I’m looking at this data, I start worrying. So what do I do? I look at competitive advantage: initially, I try to compete with cooler devices (the Nseries) and while it stops some of the bleeding, it doesn’t appear to fully halt the competition. So I start looking at services as a way to stabilize revenue (Maps, Music, Games) but that doesn’t stick. Then I realize that my problem is the operating system: I’m stuck with that alliance of partners I have but they’re slowing me down. So I have to take over. But I can’t do that by just kicking all of them out. So I acquire and open source.

The open source move fills three strategic objectives:

• I get to keep partners still involved but get them to agree to my taking charge.
• I get other people to improve my code and/or developing FOR it, thus allowing me to counter a potential Google threat if it ever materializes.
• I get to look more “open” than Apple and will use that in my messaging

The Future: Collateral Damage Then Status Quo

Of course, while it works out great for Nokia, there is a little bit of collateral damage:

• Sun’s offering, while interesting had already sunk largely into irrelevancy so they’re no longer a player.
• Palm OS, was teetering on the edge but now it’s pretty much cooked.
• Linux, while still having teeth, will probably see its market share dwindle as its unique selling proposition (more open than others) is gone.

So that’s unfortunate but what does it do to the rest of the market. Well, in fact, it looks like today’s events wont’ have much impact: Palm, Linux and Sun represent about 5 percent of the market. With Apple at 7%, RIM at 11%, Microsoft at 12% and Nokia at 65%, it looks like the market will stay pretty consistent. The remaining 5% will be carved out by the existing players and by Google’s entry into the market. Nokia will remain at the top for now.

Potential events that could have a more disruptive effect: a Microsoft/RIM partnership (or outright acquisition) which, when integrated would give Windows Mobile a 23% market share. But short of such a move, it looks like the situation will mostly stay at status quo for the time being.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title No Changes in Mobile. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

In order to understand the impact, one has to understand how Microsoft used to work. In the past, Microsoft was all about protecting two key platforms: Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. As both tools represent the bread makers of the company, ensuring strong revenue while they try to go after markets, the Redmond giant was loath to do anything that could potentially help competitors in any way. As a result, they closely protected their own ecosystem and worked hard on spreading a message that essentially said that using other operating system was bad for your business.

With this announcement, we may see a new Microsoft: one that is open to the realities of the marketplace. Linux is not going away and Microsoft knows it so, instead of trying to fight it head on, the company has decided to take its embrace and extend attitude and wrap its arms around the operating system.

This is both a blessing and a potential threat to Linux vendors. Computing history shows that when Microsoft embraces a competitor, that competitor may need to start rethinking its strategy.

The first step, beyond announcing support for Linux, is creating a team focused on Linux. From their announcement:

Microsoft is committed to providing a positive customer experience when running supported Linux operating systems as guests in Virtual Server 2005 R2. Therefore, the product support model for these configurations will be consistent with existing customer support for Virtual Server products. Customers who report interoperability issues with Linux guests or virtual machine add-ins will be routed to a team that is specially trained to troubleshoot issues related to Linux guests within Virtual Server 2005 R2.

What we are seeing here is nothing short of a major revolution at Microsoft. By having some people fully dedicated to supporting Linux, the company will gain a deep competitive knowledge of what works and what doesn’t with Linux servers.

As a result of that acknowledgment, Windows is now going to evolve to better counter the threat of Linux. While Redmond was large in denial as to the power of Linux, the message is now that they are taking it heads on, using code instead of rhetoric to fight it.

Linux fans may be rejoicing at the news but I would take a more careful approach and say beware. In 1997, Microsoft carefully embraced Java. What followed was the quick death of Java as a front end technology, forcing Sun to reposition it as a back-end coding technology. While Java has thrived, Sun was forced to reposition it in order to make it thrive. Few Windows programmers switched to Java and Microsoft managed to protect its own investment in Visual Basic, building a lot of Java-like functionality in its development tools and then introducing tools that could stay competitive while integrating with Windows, thus protecting the Microsoft ecosystem.

The question that Linux developers will have to ask themselves is where the benefits of this Microsoft embrace lie. While it may look like a capitulation, it may just be a strategic shift in their offensive. By gaining a deeper understanding of the value of Linux (and, if you look at the versions of Linux they are supporting, price is not really the competitive threat they are trying to counter but features seem to be as all the supported products are paid ones) and building it in their future offerings.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this relationship evolves. I see two potentially different scenarios coming out of this:

• Microsoft increases its embrace of Linux and is genuinely interested in being more open, thus allowing them to sell products that work in a more mixed environment, which would help them get into areas in which they are weak, thus increasing potential sell of the new “good citizen” Windows version. This could stem from Microsoft’s realization that their biggest competitive threat is not coming from the outside but from the inside: existing versions of Windows may be good enough for most people so, to ensure upgrades to future version, Microsoft needs to evolve the market to an area where they play well with others.
• The other, darker, scenario, would be one where Microsoft embraces and extends Linux in the future. It would first discover what makes Linux a better sell than Windows and incorporate Linux-like functionality in their OS, thus reducing the potential threat. Once it matches features, the company would then present all the advantages of Windows in terms of installed base and use that as leverage to impede the growth of Linux.

I don’t yet know which of these scenarios the company will follow but it will be interesting to see how this develops. I hope that the first one, with Microsoft being genuine in its acknowledgment of new realities and becoming more open, is what they are shooting for but past history has told another story. Only time will tell whether they can truly move forward and become a more open company and if that happens, this moment will be seen as a historical shift not only in Microsoft history but in computing history as a whole.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Microsoft Does Linux. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Before I go any further in this, I want to have a huge disclaimer: I’m a pretty big fan of some Google products. One can see Google ads running on this site (I’m an AdSense user) and a portion of my traffic gets here thanks to Google’s search engine. i’m also a big user of the search engine, I have a Gmail account (although it is not my primary email system) and I use Google Maps and Google News often. I’ve played with the search API in the past and, for the most part, I’ve been happy with my overall Google experience. However, I worry that the company is heading in the wrong direction and I want to ensure they remain a viable player as they have re-ignited investments in the search space, which has benefited all users on the Internet. However, I fear that, if they are not careful, they could suffer a fate similar to that of Netscape, which popularized web browsing and ended up being gobbled up by AOL, where it is now a shadow of its former self.

That said, let’s look at some of the disturbing similarities.

Market Shares are no guarantee

In the early days of the commercial Internet (let’s say 1996), Netscape was a very successful company. It had beaten every Wall Street expectation and completed a stock offering that had captured the imagination of the general public. The Netscape management graced the covers of most magazines in America and the little browser that could (then in version 2.0) had captured an impressive 75+ percent of the market. Netscape had also introduced its own line of web servers, with a proprietary language called LiveWire, which allowed to create more dynamic applications. The company was also offering a web page development tool, and struck partnerships with many companies to integrate their audio and video components with the browser.

Microsoft had come out with Windows 95, which included a browser (Internet Explorer) which they had licensed from an outside source (NCSA, the place where Marc Andreesen had worked prior to Netscape and the browser was Mosaic, an early web browser Marc had been involved with). The world had mostly laughed at the pitiful version 1.0 offering from Redmond. It was simply a bad product, which did not get much redemption with version 2.0.

Microsoft on the Offensive

The folks at Netscape were feeling pretty smug. After all, they dominated the browser market, had managed to get a way to sell server products and comments about the upcoming irrelevance of Microsoft started making the rounds. But the giant was awake and the clouds over Redmond only covered a flurry of activity. By the time IE 3.0 was released, most people had written Microsoft off. If they couldn’t get as simple a piece of code as a browser to catch up, how could they have a chance to survive.

Netscape had come out with version 3.0 and it was good, if a little bloated from the everything but the kitchen sink approach they were taking. Netscape was now offering an Internet suite that included a browser, a mail client, a newsreader client, an IRC client, some groupware capabilities, etc, etc… There was no way Microsoft could catch up.

Netscape Navigator 4 came out and it was good. It was running Java applets, it could do DHTML, etc.. Basically people liked it and didn’t see a reason to switch…

But Microsoft released IE 4.0 and it was better than people expected. it matched the Netscape browser feature for feature and threw in a few things. One of the people in charge of that development was a guy by the name of Yusuf Medhi, who now happens to be the head of MSN.

While Microsoft had fired a major shot with that new browser, everyone expected that all that would change again when Netscape 5 would come out.

Netscape 5 never came out. In fact, Microsoft release IE 5.0 and started gaining market shares (stealing them from Netscape). Netscape seemed to be trapped in its own legacy and had problem getting a new product out. Microsoft release IE 5.5 and Netscape was working on a new rewrite of their product.

Finally, Netscape 6 came out, conveniently skipping a version. Was it the answer to Microsoft that all had hoped? Not quite and by that point it was too late.

Netscape never recovered and now lives as a shadow of its former self. Microsoft put out a 6.0 version of their browser, cleaning up some of the last parts of the markets they wanted and then went to sleep, in terms of browser, until the recent competitive threat of Firefox reared its head, eating up some of their hard earned market shares.

So what went wrong? The answer is complex but I believe that a mix of Hubris (we can beat Microsoft, we have a huge market share) combined with some sloppy releases, the development of a bit of a monoculture (we set the agenda, the industry will follow), an unwillingness to deal with massive competitive threats, a loss of focus on core assets, and a media world that loves to take down the companies they’ve built up all added up.

How does this apply to Google?

For starters, it is clear that massive market shares are no guarantee of success. Google currently holds around 60 percent of the search market, which is good but is also a reason for concern as it is more likely that this share will go down than it is that it will go up.

More worrisome, however, is the development of the Google monoculture. Much of what is going on at Google is happening with little involvement and input from the community. This is where Microsoft generally starts striking. Say what you want about the Redmond giant, they know how to listen and how to take brutal feedback and turn it into decent product. Microsoft is not known for great products but it is known for decent ones. Last week, Microsoft organized Search Champs, gathering a bunch of smart people from the industry in a room and having them talk to them. I was there and was surprised by how focused they are on winning this one. It is the kind of focus I have not seen come from them since the browser wars.

If it wants to survive, Google needs to do something similar. Throwing a product out to the world with the world beta on it is not a feedback loop. Sitting down with users, developers, thought leaders is. The feedback is not always good but it helps improve the product, which is how one wins this war. Furthermore, the goodwill generated by getting people invested in its products and their success allows a company to develop a strong following from a small group of dedicated users, who then serves as advocates in the marketplace. They can have an impact in changing opinion and not involving them can be dangerous.

Of those people, developers tend to be the more finicky. Alas, the success of many platforms on the Internet depends on developers. As developers go, so tend the marketplace because developers tend to be early adopters. Developers were the first people to switch from Yahoo to Altavista. They were the first group to switch from Altavista to Google. Where will they go next? Is it guaranteed that they will stay with Google (however, here is an interesting case, as developers tend to have a bias against Microsoft. The corollary of this is that Microsoft has to offer something that is radically better in order to make gains in the developer world). A good way for Google to mend some of the rift with the development community would be to support RSS along with ATOM as a syndication format. At the current time, Google is the only major search engine without native RSS support.

Another area to watch out for is the loss of focus. Could someone at Google please explain to me how the Google pack, Google WiFi, Google IM or the Google web accelerator fit Google’s mission (to organize the world’s information). How does owning a radio advertising business (something they acquired recently) fit in that model? It seems that Google is trying to do a lot of things in a lot of areas. I’m sure they’re all interesting things but what does that do to the core search assets on which the business was build (or is it that search is just a side business and Google’s mission is really about advertising?) There has been much discussion in the search world about the relevancy of results in the Google search engine suffering from some level of degradation. As always, expectations are high and any decrease (or lack of improvement) in the quality of the search index will be seen as a loss of focus.

Following the Netscape sloppy release, Google also has to worry about better testing before putting products out. Its recent stumbles with the release of Google NewsReader and Google Analytics showed the world products that were not fully ready for market release. The market acceptance for the word beta goes only so far and Google may suffer some reputational damage if it continues along a curve or release first and fix it later (this, however, is not necessarily a standalone cause for failure, as we’ve learned from the release of many Microsoft products that needed their own round of stabilization)

Last but not least is the burning glare of the media world and of Wall Street. As can be seen now that lofty (and, one could add, unrealistic) expectations could not be met, punishment (in the form of a declining stock price) is coming. Similarly, the press is getting more critical. This is part of a normal cycle: a company is hyped up and then taken down. These are just fads (ask your friends at Yahoo!, who have managed to go through the whole cycle and are starting to go back through a build-up phase now).

And, as a postcript, take the advice of pundits like myself with a grain of salt. There are lessons to be learned but I can’t guarantee that these are the right ones to learn. However, what is certain is that Google needs to remain a viable player in search if for no other reason than to keep companies like Microsoft honest. As we’ve seen in the browser wars, once a company wins, it tends to slow down on the innovation front and search is still so young a field that it needs major progress on the innovation front.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Googling Netscape. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

This week, Google introduced two new Firefox extensions: Google Safe Browsing and Blogger Web Comments which are providing richer integration with the desktop and a number of new features based on your surfing patterns.

But the question, when looking at those is why is Google interested in areas that don’t seem that close to search: the truth is that they are closely tied to Google’s business model, even though it’s not totally clear on a first look.

The Google business model: advertising

When you look at Google’s revenue, it becomes immediately clear that search is not really what the company is about: Google is in the business of advertising and search is the way in which it targets its advertising properly. Viewed in that prism, Google is an advertising company and advertising companies generally need a couple of things: eyeballs and data about those eyeballs.

The first part of this is easy to understand: eyeballs, to an advertising company, represent the inventory it has available for sale. However, eyeballs in and off themselves are pretty useless. The common misconceptions made by many companies in the late 90s was that eyeballs alone were important. The truth is that, without any other type of information, eyeballs are close to useless.

However, the more information you have about a set of eyeballs, the more useful it becomes. This was the realization that Google made when it moved the advertising model on its head by targeting ads based on search terms. Google then increased the amount of eyeballs it could get by offering AdSense, a program that increased inventory and provided information back to Google about what people were looking at.

With each new member of the AdSense program, Google gets more information about Internet users. The more information it has about Internet users, the better it can target its advertising.

Enter the add-ons

In May, I posited that the Google Accelerator was about distributing the indexing work. What I failed to realize at the time was that Google was also getting a lot of user information in the process: what do people look at, how long, etc… This information is extremely useful. However, the accelerator had some issues and failed to achieve high velocity.

More deals have followed, with large partnerships aimed at pushing the Google toolbar on as many desktops as possible. One could wonder why the toolbar is so important to Google. After all, they keep trying to get it bundled left and right (with Java, for example) and are pushing it very heavily in their search engine results page. The toolbar is all about getting more information about what people visit.

The new extensions are about the same thing: getting to know you better. The Google Firefox Extensions Agreement spells it out very clearly:

By using the Extensions, you acknowledge and agree that Google may access, preserve, and disclose information regarding your use of the services if required to do so by law or under other conditions set forth in the Google Privacy Policy

Digging into the privacy policy spells things out clearly (the emphasis is mine):

• Google collects personal information when you register for a Google service or otherwise voluntarily provide such information. We may combine personal information collected from you with information from other Google services or third parties to provide a better user experience, including customizing content for you.
• Google uses cookies and other technologies to enhance your online experience and to learn about how you use Google services in order to improve the quality of our services.
• Google’s servers automatically record information when you visit our website or use some of our products, including the URL, IP address, browser type and language, and the date and time of your request.

From here, we learn that Google aggregates data (no big surprise here) and can share it with third parties. Among some of the data is the URL you visited, your IP address (which can then provide some information about your physical locations), and the language you use. Those are all good attributes to narrow down information about a user. For example, if someone looks at a lot of technical web sites, Google will know that this person might respond better to a technical ad. Over time, that information can be aggregated to get a better understanding of different groups and sell very targeted advertising. Let’s look at how Google uses this information (once again, emphasis is mine and this is from their privacy policy):

• We may use personal information to provide the services you’ve requested, including services that display customized content and advertising.
• We may also use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services.
• We may share aggregated non-personal information with third parties outside of Google.
• When we use third parties to assist us in processing your personal information, we require that they comply with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
• We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process, preventing fraud or imminent harm, and ensuring the security of our network and services.
• Google processes personal information on our servers in the United States of America and in other countries. In some cases, we process personal information on a server outside your own country.

If you remember my first point (Google is an advertising company), it starts to click. The technology and services they provide are not necessarily to the end user; they can also be to advertisers. This is why there is little worry about Google identifying you personally but being able to provide aggregated non-personal information to a third part is what advertising is all about.

In the television world, much of that work is being done by Nielsen (the infamous Nielsen ratings) to define what the audience of a show is and target the advertising properly. This is where the ideas like “give me around 100,000 eyeballs for men 18–24 in the New York area” yields an ad on a sports show about a New York sports team.

However, Google can do that better in that they can offer advertisers something along the lines of “17,000 eyeballs of 19 year old men based in Manhattan, NY with an interest in the Knicks and the Xbox 360, who also read sport news three times last week from ESPN, like the Daily Show and bought hardware and books from Amazon.com in the last 30 days.” It may sound extreme but let me explain how it works:

• The bought hardware and books can be gathered from the fact that they looked at URLs on Amazon.com and ended up on a purchase path as a result of that session (this would all be URL info)
• The same can be true of the ESPN.com and theDailyShow sites (gathered from the URL field)
• The interests (Xbox, the Knicks) can be inferred from where they spend time in their online session or what they searched for on Google
• The location (Manhattan, NY) can be inferred from the IP address they used during their surfing session (alternately, if they use Google WiFi, it can be gathered from the info that client has reported)
• The 19 year old men can be inferred from their email (Gmail) or usage patterns (this is where the research and analysis part come in) as relating to other 19 year old men

In fact Google is so sure of their data that they will guarantee advertisers that, if their ad did not get a response, they don’t pay for it. The TV station doesn’t do that. Once you’ve run the ad and they verified the audience, if you’ve met the number, you’re good.

Let’s assume that you have a million dollars in advertising to try to sell your new widget (which targets that public): where would you put it?

The rich data set that Google is building has tremendous monetary value and that is why they keep pushing new clients that provide them with more info.

Attention as value

Because that data is very valuable, the current stream of organizations like AttentionTrust is one thing Google will have to deal with down the line. Such efforts are actually putting the power in the hands of the users and could potentially represent a threat to Google, if people refuse to start providing data to it. It will be interesting to see how Google deals with this new world.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Getting to Know You. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

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HideAgent	PostNuke
HideAgent	Powermarks
HideAgent	psbot
HideAgent	Python-urllib
HideAgent	QuepasaCreep
HideAgent	Radio*
HideAgent	Rainbow
HideAgent	rdflib
HideAgent	Robozilla
HideAgent	RPT-HTTPClient
HideAgent	SAGEM-
HideAgent	SAMSUNG
HideAgent	Scrubby
HideAgent	SHARP-
HideAgent	SideWinder
HideAgent	slurp@inktomi.com
HideAgent	Scooter
HideAgent	searchspider.com
HideAgent	SearchSpider.com
HideAgent	SEC-
HideAgent	semanticdiscovery
HideAgent	SIE-
HideAgent	SharpReader
HideAgent	Shareware
HideAgent	SlimBrowser
HideAgent	Snoopy
HideAgent	SOFTWING_TEAR_AGENT
HideAgent	SonyEricsson
HideAgent	spider@spider.ilab.sztaki.hu
HideAgent	SpiderKU
HideAgent	Spinne
HideAgent	SmartDownload
HideAgent	stealthBrowser
HideAgent	Steeler
HideAgent	SuperBot
HideAgent	SurveyBot
HideAgent	Sweeper
HideAgent	Syndic8
HideAgent	Syndirella
HideAgent	Syndigator
HideAgent	Tagword
HideAgent	Technoratibot
HideAgent	Teleport
HideAgent	Teoma
HideAgent	Teradex
HideAgent	Terrar
HideAgent	T-H-U-N-D-E-R-S-T-O-N-E
HideAgent	timboBot
HideAgent	TurnitinBot
HideAgent	http://www.tutorgig.com/
HideAgent	UltraLiberalFeedParser
HideAgent	Vagabondo
HideAgent	verzamelgids
HideAgent	VoilaBot
HideAgent	W3C_Validator
HideAgent	w3m
HideAgent	www.walhello.com
HideAgent	www.wapsilon.com
HideAgent	WebCapture
HideAgent	Webclipping
HideAgent	WebFilter
HideAgent	WebGather
HideAgent	WebGo
HideAgent	WebRACE
HideAgent	websitealert.net
HideAgent	WebStripper
HideAgent	WebTV
HideAgent	WebZIP
HideAgent	WEP
HideAgent	Wget
HideAgent	Wildgrape
HideAgent	WinHttp.WinHttpRequest
HideAgent	Xenu
HideAgent	Zealbot
HideAgent	ZyBorg

I will publish a webalizer.conf file soon for people who don’t want to bother with making all the changes themselves.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Webalizer.conf hacking: HideAgent. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What is efficiency?

Efficiency relates to how fast a user accomplish tasks once he or she has learned to use a system. The basic idea behind it is that, as you use a computer system more and more, your level of expertise in use of that system increases, thus lowering the amount of time that it took you to do a particular task. A good example of this is in the concept of shortcuts or quick keys. For example, many people use CTRL-X to cut a piece of text on a PC (alternatively, Mac users use Apple-X) and use CTRL-V to paste text (or Apple-V on the Mac). This is a very basic concept that allows people to be more efficient: Without this, a user would have to highlight the text with their mouse, then go to the edit menu, pick the cut item in the menu, then go to the place where the text is to be pasted, go back to the edit menu and click on the paste item in the menu. Using the quick keys, they highlight the text they want to cut, press CTRL-X, go where they want to paste the text and press CTRL-V. In this process, two extra time-consuming tasks have been removed. While it may not seem like much, if you consider the number of times a user might use those function in a given day, it adds up to quite a large amount of time.

So how do we do this?

One of the main challenge to the OSS community in terms of improving usability will stem from the fact that most OSS developers do not interact with everyday users when they are developing a system. The challenge here is in figuring out how to increase the speed at which a user can do a particular task. A good example used in the usability community to explain this concept is that of the microwave. The basic question boils down to which is faster, cooking a cup of water for 1 minute and 10 seconds or 1 minute and 11 seconds? From a purely mathematical answer, one would say that the former is the fastest. But from an interface standpoint, it isn’t. A user can more quickly type 1–1-1 than 1–1-.. This seems completely counter-intuitive to established mathematical formulas but highlights some of the complexities of usability design. What this highlights, however, is that one must think of those things before coding. This means that basic usability issues should be part of the design cycle of an application.

Highlighting efficiency

Here are a few points that one should consider as part of this process:

• Are my error messages clear? A user receiving a message along the lines of java.lang.foo error 1023123 will be confused. However, if the same message says Your request could not be processed, please press enter again, the user will be working more efficiently. Clear instructions are part of a good usability system. In this case, the user is not spending a while trying to figure out what happens and is asked to do something to solve the problem!
• Does my system give feedback? This is important because users left without feedback tend to hesitate before moving on to the next step. A good example of how not to do this is the send e-mail screen in Squirrelmail, an otherwise really nice open sourced webmail application. When one presses send, the screen comes back to an empty message, giving no indication as to whether mail was sent or not. This lack of feedback left me confused and wondering whether the email had been sent or not the first time I used it. In this case, a simple Your email has been sent message would have done the trick.
• Is there a convention for this function? In the control key example, I showed how people might expect CTRL-X and CTRL-V to act as the cut and paste functions. Do not go against those basic rules as it will confuse the user. Generally, mainstream applications follow the same principles for basic functions. Here’s a quick sample of commonly used function (for Mac, replace the CTRL with the Apple key):
  • CTRL-A: Select All
  • CTRL-B: Bold text (in editing mode)
  • CTRL-C: Copy
  • CTRL-F: Find
  • CTRL-I: Italic text (in editing mode)
  • CTRL-N: New
  • CTRL-O: Open
  • CTRL-P: Print
  • CTRL-Q: Quit
  • CTRL-S: Save
  • CTRL-U: Underline (in editing mode)
  • CTRL-V: Paste
  • CTRL-X: Cut
  • CTRL-Y: Redo
  • CTRL-Z: Undo

  Reusing commonly used functions will allow users who have used other systems to easily make the jump to yours, without have to relearn a lot of tasks. This will make them more efficient as the learning curve to move to your program will be lessened.

• Is the behavior of my system consistent from window to window? Some people believe in innovating by providing different ways to navigate a piece of software, depending on where in the software you are. As a general rule, this is a bad idea as it confuses the user. If your first entry screen launches new windows, make sure that all the buttons launch a new window. Similarly, if it overwrites the main window, make sure that’s the case for all sub-items (and make sure there’s a clear way to come back to the previous window!) Users expect application to work in a consistent manner so choose an approach in terms of presenting screens, and stick to it!
• Is my navigation clear? This is something where the OSS community can actually improve on the overall user experience. With Windows 2000, Microsoft has started to change the navigation based on how much users use a particular function (the infamous “where are my tools” menu). This is a really bad idea and flies in the face of convention when it comes to usability. Make sure that your navigation is consistent and do not make it disappear (navigation should not evolve! The other issue here is the concept of mystery navigation. This is more of an issue when people deal with designers. A designer might feel really strongly that the best way to “improve” the interface is to use some cutesy button instead of presenting something that is clear. Trust me, a button that says “main menu” is better than a twisty button that hides what the menu is.

If you follow those basic points, users will become more efficient when using your program. As a result, they will be happier and will tell all their friends to use it. See, usability is already paying off!

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Usability 101: Efficiency. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Wired is the first publication to test it out and there are ample benefits to the advertisers. First of all, they can track what publication has prompted someone to go to their site and second they can target readers of those pubs with different messages. Interesting concept but what’s the advantage to the customer?

Unfortunately, Digimarc’s approach is not that uncommon in our industry. Designers build sites that are beautiful eye candy requiring tons of plug-ins and then wonder why more people are not using them. The answer is quite simple: customers do not like to download plug-ins and a recent study showed that customers do not even care that much for graphics on a page.

In a reversal of what is happening in the print world, Internet consumers want text. So why do more and more sites insist on having such things as slow flash movies at their entrance? Quite simply because they do not pay attention to what their customer want. In a recent editorial on his Flash weblog Flazoom, Chris McGregor is calling on all Flash developers to focus on the customers.

At the same time, Jakob Nielsen, “the guru of web page usability”, is talking about using Customers as Designers. The message here is simple: Focus on your customers and they will focus on you.

This may sound like a rant on my part but it’s something that’s been brewing over time. Too many companies have taken their customers for granted (the “if you build it, they will come” phenomenon) and have then wondered why their projected growth was not happening. In a word: Not enough work on usability and too much focus on design.

The genesis

But in a way, this is not an unusual phenomenon. Back in the mid eighties, when desktop publishing tools became available, people at the forefront of that revolution felt the need to use most of the tools. As a result, many publications would come out with different fonts for headlines, story, sub-heads, etc… often making the newsletter or magazine almost unreadable. To a large extent, the apotheosis of this phenomenon was the rise of Wired as a publication, and their almost unreadable Mind Grenades. Yes, they were pretty to look at but they were low on content and high on graphical treatments.

Over the years, Wired has become more conservative in its layout but the damage didn’t stop in print. Taking what they had learned about badly communicating in print, Wired pushed the envelope further on the web by using a number of icons and less than obvious names for their sections. It was fine in the name of experimentation and the folks at hotwired eventually pulled back from their to create more understandable sections but many took it as the reason for creating over-bloated pages with bad navigation.

However, I have to admit that most of us back in those days were checking out Hotwired to see how far the medium could be pushed. It was exciting and since few of us had had many years of experience, we spent countless hours dissecting what was working and what wasn’t.

One step forward and one step back

Hotwired went back to a more traditional look (at least by their standards) in 1995–1996 and started organizing its content around sections that made a little more sense. In the meantime, plug-ins came out, Java came out and we all felt a need to implement the latest technologies on our sites. What we didn’t realize at the time was that while we were putting Java Tickers and 2.0 features on the sites, we were closing the door for a few more people who did not have the technology to look at our sites. With each iteration of a new browser, there was a mad race as to who would implement the latest and greatest extensions and we ended up with sites that were, for the most part, unusable by a lot of people.

This is when the split started between two schools of web page creation: the interface designers, who were arguing that the web was more like a software application and that the role of a web page was similar to that of software and should have a clean design that was transparent to the user (I remember arguing that we should never be happy when a user talked about our design because it meant he or she had noticed it) and the graphic designer group, who believed that the beauty of design was more important than its functionality.

On the interface side, people started looking at whether a site scaled back gracefully, all the way to the lynx text browser. As a result, somewhat more boring-looking pages were born but users were coming in, getting the information they wanted, and getting out.

On the designer side, people continued to look at ways to enhance the experience, adding all kinds of sounds and plug-ins to create more interactive sites. Those sites looked great but needed users to keep up with the latest technologies in order to use those features.

A middle group started looking at templatization and automatic browser identification (the smart way to do things but I didn’t realize it back then) and serving different pages based on what platform the consumer was using. Ultimately, that last group was right in that it can now go on and implement new presentation schemes offering the same content in different format.

Why this diatribe?

Ultimately, this issue is one of customer focus. Back in those days, we didn’t have many customers to cater to (the web was not as mainstream as it is now) so we were afforded the chance to make mistakes. However, now, there is little room for those mistakes and there is an established body or work (and a few corpses) to look at when making decision. Ultimately, however, it’s about the customers.

Another example

I used to love Kozmo for their quick delivery and their clean interface. Then they decided to redesign the site to create more space for them to sell other product. From the inside, I’m sure it made sense: try to sell more products to each customer coming in the door. The problem, though, is that this redesign slowed down their system to a crawl. When I was happy with Kozmo, I didn’t care much about UrbanFetch, Kozmo’s biggest competitor in New York. However, the long time it took to load a single page on Kozmo’s site convinced me to take a look at UrbanFetch. I did, their site reacted faster and I started ordering more from UrbanFetch than I do from Kozmo. Why is this relevant? Quite simply because I am now putting my dollars somewhere else because a redesign pushed Kozmo one step back. As a result, their attempt to sell me more resulted in my buying less from them. Not a good trend and I hope for them that I am more of the exception rather than the rule. But somehow, I doubt it.

Back to the end-user

I’d like to propose a somewhat radical idea: take everything your company is doing and explain, for each of those components, the benefits to your customers. For example, why is a cookie for your ad important? Answer: it allows us to better target customers, hence providing them with ads that may appeal to them and be related to what they are interested in. It’s a bit of a stretch but the customer derives value from being presented with something that is more along the lines of their interest.

So what about Digimarc?

In the case of Digimarc, who’s the end user? It’s the reader of a magazine. Why should that reader use such a technology? Because it enhances the magazine. Just keeping the technology as a way to bridge paper ads to web promotions doesn’t really enhance the customer experience but how about using it as a web to link to more info. For example, if you were a subscriber, you would get a version that allows you to delve deeper in a story. I would scan the page, it would send me to the publication’s web site, where I would find such things as links to the companies mentioned, links to other articles about the subject in this magazine’s archives, etc (furthermore, the publication can sell advertising on these online pages to advertisers that are already using the technology in the print edition)… This would add real value to the experience, truly creating a bridge between the print content and the online one. The concept is good but the implementation right now needs that kind of tweak. If you’re an advertiser using that technology, try to push the magazines to follow that concept through, hence unlocking extra value for you.

Conclusion

Of course, focusing on the customer is no guarantee of complete success but it goes a long way in taking you there. Technology is always intrusive, the question is how do we make it less so and therefore increase usage of that technology. Of course, there will always been a few people out there trying out everything new (I am one of those people) but those of us who do are already favorably predisposed toward technology. In other words, we are not the right kind of focus group. If you are a technologist or a techophiliac, you are not the right person to judge whether this will work with the mass public. Ask someone around you who doesn’t use technology as much as you do (parents, friends, people at the corner store) about how they feel about a particular concept and start aligning your thoughts with theirs. Look at what you’re doing critically (does this make sense to someone with average or low computer skills?) and focus on your customer. It’s a tough practice and it’s often a frustrating one, as you will find that what may have seemed obvious to you isn’t to other people. But the end result will be that your customers will love you for it and will keep coming back.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title It’s About the Customer. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

AOL started moving further on its AOL Anywhere Strategy by announcing partnerships to deliver its Instant Messenger services on the Bell South and Sprint PCS network and to equip Neopoint, Nokia, and Motorola devices with the necessary software to do this too.

Microsoft announced partnerships with Nextel and Airtouch to deliver MSN to their networks. This follows recent announcements by Microsoft that its technology would be integrated in Sony and Quallcom wireless devices.

Meanwhile, Palm Computing announced a deal with Sun Microsystems to make Sun’s iPlanet service available to Palm VII users.

But with all the hype, one has to wonder whether wireless is truly here and what hurdles it has to overcome. From this issue on, I will take a quick look at some of the issues facing wireless web implementors these days, adding wireless as a new category of coverage. We will start with the formats.

WAP, WML, HDML, PQA???

It seems the wireless space in adept at developing a new set of standards. While this world is just burgeoning, a number of implementations have already surfaced.

WAP

: As defined by the WAP Forum, WAP is the Wireless Application Protocol. Think of it essentially as HTTP for the wireless crowd. Backed by the W3C, the IETF, and the ECMA, as well as most large wireless industry players, WAP has become the de facto standard for wireless delivery. However, some companies (NTT comes to mind) have tried presenting alternatives to WAP and have so far been relatively unsuccessful. However, I doubt that WAP will go very far as it limits the number of characters that can be sent to about 1600. For stock quotes or weather reports, it’s a great think but beyond that, I doubt that anyone will use it for Ecommerce or content.

WML

: WML stands for Wireless Markup Language and is an XML based subset of HTML. However, a war as broken out in that space, with phone.com (one of the early pioneers in the wireless space) striking out on its own and developing a competing standard called HDML.

HDML

: HDML, or Handheld Markup Device Language, phone.com proposal for a new markup language. At the current time, the W3C has worked with phone.com and other markup language partners in an attempt to resolve the incompatibilities between the two offerings. With the cachet of WML increasing over the past year, phone.com has started supporting both format but offers HDML has a language with new tags that allow it to extend WML applications. Because it was an early player in the field, phone.com has taken a lead and could be the Microsoft or Netscape of that space. As a result, the extensions they are providing can’t be ignored.

HTML 4.0 mobile

: Last year, with the introduction of HTML 4.0, the W3C made some recommendations in terms of supporting HTML for wireless devices. Throwing further confusing in the wireless space, the W3C decided that HTML 4.0 and its successors might be the way to go, throwing more oil on the wireless fire. While no recommendation has been made yet on an actual standard and in spite of the W3C’s claim that it is working to resolve disputes with the W3C, expect some serious in-fighting between the different groups as they try to position themselves in the next hot web application space.

PQA (Palm Web Clippings)

: A couple of years ago, I pointed out that the Palm OS could be a potential Java competitor in the non-PC devices space. As could be expected, Palm went out and introduced the Palm VII, a wireless device with connections to the web. What was surprising, however, is that instead of going out and supporting either WML, HDML, or even HTML, they decided to introduce their own format to distribute web content: PQA or the Palm Query Application language. PQA is a paired-down HTML version that allows you to distribute content on the wireless Palm platform. Since services like OmniSky plan to offer wireless access to Palm devices other than the Palm VII, and since Palm already has an established footprint in the PDA space, expect PQA applications to pop up left and right.

A lot of format but what do I implement for?

At the current time, it seems there are no clear winners in the space however it seems clear that WAP has a strong lead in the delivery space for small bits of data. But WAP will not be the way to do Ecommerce or content as a clear character limitation makes it fairly useless for this. On the markup front, I’d strongly recommend looking at WML as it has received support from some of the larger players (Microsoft and Sun, among others) and seems to be the basic level of functionality. However, you should also look very seriously at the PQA format because of Palm’s extremely large footprint in the PDA space.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Wireless: A confusing Landscape. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Morphing software

Many of the media seemed to miss the story, however, treating it as just another company announcing a new computer chip. What they missed, largely, is the revolution heralded by Transmeta’s code morphing software. What it does is translate X86 instruction into Transmeta’s native code.

The revolution behind this lies mainly in the fact that this architecture could theoretically allow machines running Crusoe (the Transmeta line of chips) to act not only like x86 machines running either Windows, Linux, BSD, BeOS, or Solaris for x86 but also run code designed for any other chip. All they would have to do is throw in a different version of the morphing software on top of the chip (say, for example a G4 software layer) and run the OS running on other machines.

Logically, what Transmeta has done is simply create the most versatile chip in the industry, allowing it to morph into all the most popular computer chips out there through software emulation.

And because the first translation layer they built is the x86 one, it means that their chip can now power Windows and Linux boxes as well as any Intel chip.

In other words, what Transmeta announced today is that they had built a chip that is what Sun is trying to build with the Java chip, and in the process they have created what is essentially a virtual machine that addresses directly the chip, completely bypassing the OS.

Caching for better performance

Another interesting part of the announcement of an adaptive algorithm in their chip set that caches the most often use instruction sets. As a result, the performance of the chip is greatly increased because the Transmeta software caches the information that repeats itself. In the demo they gave at their press conference, they showed how running a DVD movie on a Pentium III processor compared to running the same movie with the same DVD reader on a Crusoe chip. The difference was stunning. While on the Pentium III, the idle time drop from roughly 90% to roughly 50% for the duration of their running the application, the Crusoe chip first saw a spike to less than 50% for a couple of minutes and then went back into idle mode as all the necessary instructions to run the DVD players had been cached in memory.

The bottom line here is that they have essentially created an adaptive multi-tasking environment on a chip.

Built-in power management

The other thing that was interesting was their approach to power management. For starter, the Crusoe chips do not call on all areas of a processor all the time. Because of the adaptive nature of their memory caching system, they show a major performance increase at a lower consumption rate. According to the Transmeta web site,

When an application doesn’t need peak processor performance, the model TM5400 can save power by reducing its clock speed and voltage. Using Transmeta’s LongRun power management technology, software continuously monitors the demands on the processor, dynamically and smoothly adjusting the processor’s speed to exactly what is needed to run the application.

You probably keep more than one application open on your computer at a time (for example, as I’m writing this, my email client is running in the background, as well as a few browser windows from which I’m getting information) but most of those being in the background, they should take major amounts of CPU. A Crusoe enabled machine would realize that and reduce the voltage consumption of those tasks, therefore increase the battery life on your computer (this is, of course, aimed at the Mobile market Transmeta is going after).

On a regular machine, the chip knows either how to turn a process on or off but not how to degrade it to lower power consumption. As a result, Transmeta has built a better mousetrap.

Upgradeable through the Internet?

Because the core of the chip resides in a software layer that sits above the hardware level, it is possible to create a chip that is upgradeable through the Internet. A few years ago, the first ROM-upgradeable modems came out, allowing users to move from a 28.8kbps modem to an 56k modem by just downloading software. Theoretically, Crusoe chips should be upgradeable in much the same way, which makes for an interesting world where hardware and software become closer.

But why does Linus Torvalds work there?

The question on the mind of hordes of Linux users was why would Linus work at a chip company? Well, today, the answer was given. Along with the announcement of the new chip, Transmeta announced Mobile Linux, a version of Linux designed for systems without hard disks, such as Mobile Internet devices (for example, Web pads, palmtops, etc…)

The principal enhancements for Mobile Linux will be in power management and in the reduction of the memory footprint. So that’s what Linus has been working on all this time, as well as being part of the team that built the morphable software. All and all, one can say that it was really smart of them to add him to their roster of talent, as it will fire up the Linux community to develop for this new version of Linux (and yes, Mobile Linux will be open source).

Style change

In what may be a departure from the industry’s playbook, Transmeta decided to announce the products they had on hand. Yes, the chips are available today (they mentioned that IBM would manufacture some of them) and no, they won’t answer any questions about the future. In other words, this is no vaporware but a very real set of products. This could change the way companies around the industry release their products.

The losers: Palm Computing, Sun, Intel, Motorola and AMD

All and all, this announcement changes the landscape for a couple of major players. For starters, Palm Computing might find itself in the middle of a very big battle. Because of the low power consumption of the Crusoe chips and the introduction of Mobile Linux, it is now possible to envision Palm-sized devices that can run audio and video. This represents a major threat to Palm Computing’s installed base.

Second among the losers today are the chip companies. Because they can run the x86 set, Transmeta’s chips are a potential replacement for Intel and AMD chips in the laptop market. A lot of the problems those chips have encountered is that the higher the processor speed, the hotter the chips run, and the larger the fans that need to be used to cool them. If Crusoe holds up as well as they demoed, Transmeta could capture a major lead in the laptop market. Add the morphing software architecture and Transmeta could also become a competitor to chip makers Sun and Motorola.

Sun is further hurt in the fact that this is a virtual chip that takes away from the concept of virtual machines that Sun pushed with Java. As a result, Sun’s hope of covering the market with Java devices as well as their JINI-everywhere strategy may have to be rethought.

The winners: Linux, Microsoft, Consumers

Linux is a clear winner with the introduction of Mobile Linux, which will strengthen Linux’s gain in the computer market by offering it as an alternative to any other OS in the hand held market.

Microsoft, interestingly, also becomes a winner with this. With Intel making some moves to back alternative operating systems, Microsoft was finding itself in the difficult position of being somewhat subservient to its biggest ally. Yes, there’s AMD but Crusoe is yet another competitor to Intel, which only strengthens Microsoft’s position in dealing with the chip manufacturer. Also, Microsoft gains some advantage here because its Windows OS can now run at better performance levels on handheld devices. Yes, it will have to battle Mobile Linux but this could make the main Windows line (Windows 9x and 2000) an alternative platform in the portable device market, which means that Microsoft could now ditch their efforts on WinCE and still have a card in that new market if they want to.

Consumer also stand to win from this announcement as it heralds a new age of mobility. Soon, a lot of low powered mobile devices will hit the market: Portable DVD players and wireless Internet devices now have more of a chance in the marketplace since they won’t consume as much in batteries. I think we’ll all be happy to see those new devices hit the market.

All and all, it was yet another day when a major announcement changed the computer landscape. Since that’s two major announcements in as many weeks, I wonder what’s going to happen next week.

Stay tuned!

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Transmeta Changes the Landscape. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I had just moved to New York city the previous fall and was caught into the glory of Gotham. In the process, I had managed to start making friends in the online community there. This was the year Mosaic had been born and the first year of the modern net, as far as I see it. People outside of universities were starting to connect to BBSes that were connected to the Internet all the time (this was relatively new, as most BBSes used to be one or two modem systems, allowing only a couple of users to connect simultaneously) and a few enterprising souls had set out to create a global event: first night in cyberspace. Half international friendship fest, half educational effort, our goal was to teach the world about the Internet and meet some of the people we had exchanged flurries of emails with and chatted with online. In New York, ECHO (the East Coast Hangout) and the Dorsai Embassy had partnered to hook up Grand Central terminal with 5 computers. ECHO brought the in-crowd, a mix of artists, and online aficionados who created one of the top online communities in the world and Dorsai brought the geeks, people like myself who felt that spending a weekend installing in-house networks and debugging lines of a new OS called Linux was a worthy cause.

We were high on life and high on the possibilities of the Internet, eager to show the world that they too could join people from places as remote as London and San Francisco in the first global party. Stuck in a little corner, we had 5 computers (generally lent by ECHO users) and a mission: to change the world.

We did not know how much we would end up doing in the process. Meanwhile, in some dark recesses of Silicon Valley, the small group of programmers who had brought us Mosaic were working furiously on putting the finishing touch on a new version that would be even better. A few days before they had posted the first beta of the program.

The name of the company was Mosaic Communications. The new product was a faster web browser called Netscape. And everyone on the net could email marca@mcom.com, who probably didn’t expect he would be on the cover of Time magazine less than 24 months later.

As the event went on, tens of thousands of people logged on to celebrate together. At the time, the net was only a couple of million people worldwide.

Back then, I didn’t know that this night would change a lot of things for me. Back then, I was desperately trying to find a job that was somewhat related to the Internet but there just weren’t that many. That night, all that changed. I’ve been thinking back to the day when my career went into high speed and I got caught into the Internet wave. That night was the beginning as far as I am concerned.

I had made a reputation earlier that year by starting to get involved in a Usenet newsgroup called alt.internet.media-coverage. It was a place where anyone on the Internet could go and talk about coverage of the net in the media. In those days, that coverage was so scarce that we spent our time dissecting the few stories that were printed about the net.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a lot of people in that group were also working reporters. One of those reporters was my friend Angela Gunn, whom I first met face to face on December 31st, 1993. She was at the event and our meeting ended up not only getting me my first legitimate magazine writing gig (for Web Week) but also my second job in the Internet industry and the one that eventually ended up in my helming internet.com and kick started my career.

Angela and I talked through the night about how the net was going to change everything. I think it would be honest to say that even we underestimated how sweeping a change it would end up being.

Fast forward to today. It’s only 6 years later and over half of the American population is now online. Abroad, the net is starting to catch up and massive amounts of people are starting to join in. Email addresses are as common as phone numbers, and E-commerce (a word that didn’t even exist 6 years ago) is redefining the way people buy and sell everything. Every business has a website or is considering getting one, from multinational corporations (who now have entire departments tending to their Internet and Intranet sites) to the guy around the corner.

Jeff Bezos, of Amazon.com (two names that were unknown to most people only a few years ago), is 1999 Time magazine man of the Year, and every other ad on TV is for a .company. Millions of new jobs have been created and the next great Internet business plan and the next great Internet IPO have become the new American obsession.

Back in 1994, there was no such thing as Amazon.com or Ebay. If you wanted to check out commerce on the web, you could buy hot sauce from HotHotHot (the site is still around at its original URL). Short of that, you were just out of luck.

Back then, you were lucky if you had a high-speed 28.8k modem. 56k was far down the road, DSL or cable modems just didn’t exist. Back then, to connect to the net required a fair amount of technical savvy as one had to configure their computer and make a number of different software packages work together since there was no drop-in-the-CD-and-follow-a-simple-set-of-instructions to get on the net kit and the concept of having and Internet-ready computer was unheard of.

Back then, if you told someone at a party that you worked in the Internet industry, you would have met blank stares and proceeded to explain what the Internet was, how it worked, and generally boring people in the process.

Back then, my parents were suspicious of what I was doing especially when I was explaining to them that companies would put their content on the Internet for free for everyone to read and that somehow, we would find a way to make it work economically but we were really quite sure how.

Back then, when I suggested to people at CNN that they should enhance their broadcast with extra content online and post the full transcripts of their broadcast on the Internet for free, I was pretty much laughed out of the place.

Back then, the only threat to Microsoft was Macintosh and the Mac had a much easier to use interface since Windows 95 was more vaporware than reality, having been delayed for the better part of a year. Linux was known to only a few people who had dared download it from some obscure server in Finland and had installed it on their 386s or 486s. The big advantage over windows 3.1 was not that it had a better interface but that you could telnet into it, just like you would into any regular Internet server… and it was Unix… and it was free. I personally had gotten exposed to it because a Dorsai user named Bob Young was specializing in selling CDs that had stuff you could download off the Internet on them. The big advantage of those CDs was that you could get a CD with a complete archive instead of spending hours or days downloading the same software. The name of the company was Red Hat and they were based in Westport, CT. A morning in 1995, that fact became very important to me personally: one of the machines at Internet.com was running off Linux and we needed to rebuild the whole system. I called Bob up and we drove over to his office to get a copy of the latest version of Linux he had received. He burned it on the CD right in front of us and saved the day for us. At the time, none of us realized that Linux was going to become the new threat to Microsoft and that Bob was going to become a billionaire on paper in the process.

Back then you could surf the whole web in a few days since there were less than 10,000 web sites. Yahoo didn’t yet have its own domain name and was sitting on Jerry Yang’s personal workstation at http://akebono.stanford.edu.

Back then, domain names were free. It would take another year before InterNIC started to charge $50 per year to own a domain and most were worth about that much. It would take until 1995 for the first sale of a domain name from one party to another, when Cnet bought TV.com for $15,000.

Back then, the net was still relatively quiet. Streaming media was still a thing of the future (RealAudio would debut streaming audio in 1995 and a small Israeli company called VDOnet would launch streaming video a few months later), as were Java, JavaScript, Shockwave, Flash, VBScript, and XML.

Back then, the most traffic the Internet was seeing was FTP data, and the web was still in fourth place as the most used application on the net, behind FTP, Email and Usenet. Also, spam didn’t exist yet. It would take a few extra months for two Arizona lawyers (Canter & Siegel a.k.a. “The Green Card Lawyers”) to spam Usenet.

The top online service in the country was CompuServe, followed by Prodigy, Genie, and AOL. None of them were connected to the Internet and all of them were expected to die off. While this was the case, other services were not connected to the net: we didn’t have Internet banking (although online banking was possible by using proprietary software the bank would give you) nor was there any online trading going on.

All this in 6 years. Oh my, how far we’ve gone. So with this in mind, I’d like to thank all of you for a wonderful six years and take this time to remind you that we still have a lot to do. After all, together, we are still working on creating the building blocks and moving them around.

Let’s see if we can do as much in the next 6 years as we have in the past ones.

We may have made a lot of money in the process. We may have made a lot of changes in the process. We definitely changed the world in the process.

But let’s not forget what we set out to do: to build something new, something that we could leave behind and proudly look at when we’re older.

I would like to challenge everyone on this list to come up with a way to give back to the community that has given us so much. Whether it is by spending a little time teaching a net beginner how to move around this world we created, help a school or non-profit organization to get online, or help make more data accessible through the net, please take some time off your busy schedule and go out and make a difference. We did in the last 6 years: why should we stop now.

As the year 2000 approaches, please do make that pledge to yourself and together, we’ll help this grow a little further.

That’s about it for my little sermon. As a closing note on this year, I’d like to renew my thanks to everyone I’ve worked or exchanged ideas with in the past year and I hope we’ll do some more of that. So have a great New Year’s eve celebration and I’ll see you on the other side of the calendar, the one that starts with a 2.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 1994–2000: How Things Have Changed. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.