From Software Business Community

The web: Origins and development

The World Wide Web ("the web") has had remarkable success as both an infrastructure for e-commerce, information access, and lately social networking and application of various sorts. Since its early origins as a way to share documents internally to a research laboratory, it has passed through multiple stages of refinement and development. Its growth can be characterized as organic, with no single company or organization holding a dominant position. What does the success tell us about the process by which software technologies grow and mature?

Reasons for success

Why has the web been so successful, in the sense of being widely used?

Of course, the main reason the web was successful is that it offers compelling functionality to users. At its beginning, for the first time it offered ordinary users a way to publish information on the internet, and other users to access that information. In that regard, it competed with another option, which was Gopher from the University of Minnesota.

We can also identify some other reasons for the web's success other than direct functionality:

• It offers a single unifying user interface for accessing many resources using many protocols using a single "browser" program.
• Browsers are installed on all desktop, laptop, and many mobile platforms "out of the box", eliminating the need to install special software, and giving information and application providers a way to reach a large set of users without the hurdle of software installation.
• Users become accustomed to their favorite browser and thus have less of a hurdle using new applications and accessing new sites.
• The web is so widely used that many software firms have devoted resources to expanding its capabilities.
• The success of the web builds on itself, because its popularity as a platform make it a natural starting point for new initiatives, such as "web services".

The web illustrates "indirect network effects"^[1] It offers great value to information and application providers and users precisely because it has benefited from widespread adoption. That leads to a "positive feedback" effect, in that its ubiquitous availability and use makes it a convenient starting point for new applications and meeting new requirements.

Origins

First it is useful to observe where the web was not invented. It was not invented in academe, although one might well argue that it should have been. This is arguably because of the siloing of academic departments that prevent the skills from coming together that would bringing this to fruition:

• It was not invented in computer science departments (even though it is arguably the new software technology that has made the greatest impact over the past decade) because the web as a technology is not challenging enough to attract the attention of scientists.
• It was not invented in library science departments (even though it has contributed to a revolution in information access) because they did not have sufficient technological literacy to appreciate the possibilities.
• It was not invented in business schools (even though it has been a major facilitator for the online conduct of business) because their approach is generally to take a "black-box" view of technology: make the best use of available technologies for business purposes.

The web was also not at its origin a product of venture-funded startup company, nor an existing software firm.

The web is an example of what Eric von Hipple calls the democratization of innovation^[2] Tim Berners-Lee was a technology-literate physicist working at a large laboratory, and he first conceived of the web as a way for scientists to publish information within the laboratory and make it available to other scientists. In other words, it was invented in an end-user organization with a need (information publication and access) and sufficient technological literacy to appreciate the possibilities that the Internet offered to meet this need and to come up with an initial implementation that illustrated the possibilities. Edit von Hipple argues (and gives many concrete examples) of where many of the innovative applications of technology are conceived first of all by the beneficiaries or users of those applications.

The lesson we should take away from the web is that software businesses should actively search for innovation in end-user organizations.

Ongoing development

Of course the initial implementation of the web was only a starting point. Much more had to happen to make it a success. The first crucial decision was on the part of CERN, which decided to put the technology in the public domain.

The web then was picked up by an academic laboratory at the University of Illinois, which developed an implementation of a browser called Mosaic, and that code in turn was licensed on favorable terms to a startup company, Netscape, which concentrated on browser development.

Although the web started as application (information access), it later morphed into an infrastructure for the access to many other applications (not just information access) and loosely coupled distributed computing.

Although Netscape would undoubtably have liked to be the home for web development, in fact there has been no one company that carried the technology forward. It has truly been an industry initiative.

Opportunities for research

Links

Wikipedia article
World-Wide Web Consortium

References

1. ↑ C Shapiro, HR Varian. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass, 1999.
2. ↑ von Hippel, Eric A., "Democratizing Innovation" . DEMOCRATIZING INNOVATION, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, April 2005 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=712763.