The History of the Web

I wrote last month about Netscape Time, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

A year after the Mozilla foundation was launched, Jamie Zawinski quit the project. This came as somewhat of a shock to the community. The man who had been something of an architect of the Mozilla project, and a major force at Netscape for years, was walking away.

In a blog post published on his last day, Zawinski gave his reasons, of which he had several. Netscape’s merger (and for all intents and purposes an acquisition by) AOL had been something of a last straw, but it had clearly been building for years. Zawinski expressed his frustration with an open source community too focused on incremental change and lack of focus that had resulted in one delay after another. But underneath all of it, the real problem was that Netscape had become stagnant, and had been for years. They got too big, and too distracted, ruthlessly focused on growth and profits at the expense of what once made it great.

In that post, Zawinski describes a tech world split into two groups.

And there’s another factor involved, which is that you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. Netscape’s early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting the former and start getting the latter.

That quote, I think, describes a permanent schism created by Netscape time, a pace of rapid development and releases that allowed for fast-paced innovation and a constant feedback loop with the community. Racing forward with purpose, with a team that deeply believed in what they were doing, had made Netscape great. When that same pace was applied to growth at all costs, with a team only interested in riding a wave of revenue to the top, Netscape time only made the company more bloated, and more unfocused.

For the last few decades, that’s a split that keeps coming back up.

Within a few years, Netscape time had become something of a dogma for a lot of companies building on the web, especially those concentrated in Silicon Valley. However, this came at the expense of unified web standards that was helping the web grow and move forward. A group of web standards advocates came together and formed the Web Standards Project (WaSP) to use their collective power to pressure browser makers and large tech companies to invest in a web that was accessible, open, and common to build on.

In 2002, Steve Champeon and Shirley Kaiser were interviewed about the project. Champeon had recently taken over as the project’s lead, and along with Kaiser, helped shift the organization to education of developers, helping keep people informed about how to use and implement standards-compliant code. That work had led him to recognize the same split that Zawinski had years earlier.

On the Web, you see, such short-lived tactical decisions have a tendency to stick around and become strategic. So we’re all trying to make sure that everyone takes the long view into account.

The short view or the long view. Innovation or growth. Working for a company to make it successful, or going to work for a successful company. Champeon and Kaiser had both seen organizations willfully ignore web standards, only to be undone by that decision in short order. But the pace of the web could not be stopped. Companies felt that they needed to move quickly to keep up, even if that meant moving recklessly.

WaSP was successful at a great many things, but it couldn’t reverse a blind dedication to Netscape time. The pattern continued. In 2011, Matt Linderman wrote a blog post that collected the many times that Yahoo! had tried, and failed, to acquire a company and integrate it into their product suite. Each time, Yahoo! had followed the same baffling playbook. They did their best Netscape time impression, making changes quickly and with reckless abadon without stopping to consider what actually made the products successful.

Linderman sums that up rather well.

Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely. Once they hit the two-year mark and are free to leave, the founders take off. The sites are left to flounder or ride into the sunset. And customers are left holding the bag.

At some point, people started learning the wrong lesson from Netscape time. Rather than stay laser-focused on what made their websites and products great, and be in constant conversation with the people used it, they simply tried to move quickly and build as much as possible in as short a time as possible. Throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. We even got a motto for it: “move fast and break things.” But each time Yahoo! did this, they only succeeded in pushing the original creator of the products out. And it was those original creators that actually brought a passion for the web, and what they were building.

One of those folks was Andy Baio, who had created the social event site Upcoming. After it was acquired by Yahoo!, he spoke with Wired and had a bit of advice for those building on the web. Baio boils down the whole thing to a single line, as he is often able to do.

Build something people love, and build revenue to keep it sustainable.

Advice that over a decade later, still very much rings with the same truth as Zawinski’s.

The playbook didn’t much change much with time though. Another decade later, Bandcamp founder Ethan Diamond describes exactly the same split in an interview for NPR. The interviewer, musician Damon Krukowski, opens the interview by comparing the way Bandcamp devotes itself to music while it’s primary competitor Spotify is dedicated entirely to growth. Some of the product ended up being the same, but the approach could not be more different.

Diamond, as it turns out, has some thoughts about this.

I think of Bandcamp as a music company first, because I think of who we serve as first and foremost the artist. And the way to best serve artists happens to be through technology, a particular model of technology that our business is based on

Bandcamp is trying to build something that musicisans and music lovers can really connect with. And they are making money so that they can keep building that. Spotify is building a company so that they can make money. Profits at the center, even occasionally at the expense of their core product. From that one split in thinking, it’s incredibly easy to trace a line to all of the decisions that Bandcamp has made over the years, versus the one’s made by Spotify.

This, it turns out, is a refractory lens to look at what’s being built on the web with. It is immediately clarifying. Which companies are using Netscape time for innovation, and who is using it simply for growth? Who is heeding Champeon’s warnings about short-lived tactical decisions. Are there people out there that are taking Baio’s advice to build something that people love, or are they simply building to be successful at all costs. Who out there is serving people, as Bandcamp does, rather than scooping up as many users as possible, like Spotify.

A couple of years ago, Zawinski returned to the topic of Netscape, something he doesn’t often do. And even all these years later, he recognized the same dichotomy. In a very short post, he recognizes the uniqueness and boldness of the Mozilla project, a coordinated and global effort of people building out the web. It is, and continues to be, something that is worth striving for. But it’s not hard to understand what led the project astray.

Mozilla had a duty to preserve the open web.

Instead they cosplayed as a startup, chasing product dreams of “growth hacking”, with Google’s ad money as their stand-in for a VC-funding firehose, with absolutely predictable and tragic results.

Maybe another decade on, we will finally learn this lesson.