The Crash Was a Good Thing?! What the heck is Fortune smoking???
I'm cancelling my subscription, effective immediately...
http://www.fortune.com/indext.jhtml;jsessionid=TUJLSF1BLI00GQAMEHTCFFCABQQ4O
IV1?channel=print_article.jhtml&doc_id=200865
> Welcome to Silicon Valley's Twilight Zone
> In the nation's mecca of technology, they say they've learned to stop
> worrying and love the crash. Anyone care to take a lie detector test?
> FORTUNE
> Monday, March 19, 2001
> By Mark Gimein
>
> Every two years or so Silicon Valley, that world-famous factory
> of futures,
> has a new eternal verity. In 1997, as the first dot-com millionaires were
> crawling out from under their desks into the pallid glow of the
> new economy,
> it was "The Net Changes Everything." In 1999, as every product manager
> within the fertile delta between San Francisco and San Jose got the idea
> that he was an entrepreneur, it was "We're Not Doing It for the
> Money." And
> in 2001, as the whole chicken-wire and tulip-bulb edifice comes wheezingly
> apart, there's a new consensus, a new truth, a new line in Silicon Valley:
> "The Crash Was a Good Thing."
>
> Arguably, the principle that the crash was a good thing is more firmly
> established in the psychology of Silicon Valley than were any of
> the earlier
> cliches. At the height of the Internet frenzy there were skeptics who
> thought that the Net changed almost everything. There were cynics who
> admitted, in private, that they, or at least somebody they knew,
> were doing
> it for the money. But the idea that the crash was a good thing manages to
> bring together the investors and the dot-com kids, the rich and the not so
> rich, the techies and the business people, even the smart and the stupid.
> You hear it from the chief executives of Internet companies with
> one foot in
> the grave, from engineers, from mid-level dot-commers who saw their paper
> wealth evaporate. If you set out, as I did, to take a survey of
> the state of
> the Valley circa 2001, you could hardly get through a conversation without
> hearing the line or one of its several permutations at least
> once--and more
> often two or three or four times. You hear it from so many places that you
> can easily lose track of who it is you're talking to, until it all blends
> into one seamless string of variations on a theme:
>
> "The tourists have gone home--anybody who's still doing this
> isn't doing it
> for the big payout," says a San Francisco dot-com CEO (Jim Rose, CEO of
> Mobshop). "I don't want it to sound like I'm hanging out a LOCALS ONLY
> sign," says the Sand Hill Road venture capitalist (Jeff Brody, partner at
> Redpoint Ventures), "but it was like a great resort. All the tourists came
> because everybody said it was great, and then when they got there, it was
> packed, you waited in line for everything, and the food sucked." "We got
> carpetbagged," says the scientist (Greg Papadopolous, chief technology
> officer of Sun Microsystems). "It's cleared out the dead wood," says the
> programmer (Don Nelson, engineering manager at Eazel, and a former
> Netscaper). "Now the good people are gathering around the good projects."
> And so it goes, on and on and on. "The good part of this
> correction is that
> we can return to more realistic expectations" (Dion Lim, co-founder of
> Epinions.com and founder and chief executive of Bannerama.com). "It's the
> marketing and sales types and biz dev people who said, 'Let's
> ride this wave
> while we can.' " (Elliot Stein, Stanford grad and laid-off dot-commer).
> "People who were well established in the business world swooped
> down to make
> a killing without understanding what they were getting into" (Laura La
> Gassa, programmer laid off from Critical Past). "Hopefully, this
> will build
> character. Including my own" (Dion Lim).
>
> Well, it has been something of an expensive character-building experience,
> what with a trillion dollars of paper money disappearing overnight, not to
> mention a few billion of real dollars spent on ventures from which nobody
> but the liquidators will ever see any return. But it's a nice story
> nonetheless, a comforting narrative for a confusing time. We took a tumble
> in a tornado, but when we landed we found ourselves right back in good old
> foursquare Kansas. Nothing wrong with that, right? Now we can all
> go back to
> designing software and building companies and wearing Tevas like
> we used to
> before this whole, umm, thing.
>
> If anything, the Valley insiders say, the crash serves to reinforce the
> basic principles that need reinforcing every once in a while. The venture
> capitalists pull out old reports to prove that the Net bubble was
> just like
> the retail bubble of the early '90s, the personal computer bubble of the
> '80s. As for the Great Reshuffling--the huge, albeit temporary,
> transfer of
> money to a new crop of Net zillionaires--it all worked out in the
> end. Those
> who still came out ahead when the stock prices tumbled deserved what they
> got. Those who didn't, the thinking goes, got what they deserved. "One of
> the enduring qualities of life in this valley," says Charles Darrah, an
> anthropologist who has been studying the mores of Silicon Valley
> for years,
> "is the radical individualism that says, 'It's your own fault.'" And if we
> can salve our own hurt with a bit of schadenfreude, so much the
> better: Did
> you hear the story about that David Hayden guy, who paid $8.14 million for
> an original Declaration of Independence? Now his stock's fallen
> 95% and the
> bank's closed off his credit and sold the shares he put up as collateral.
>
> So it's back to business as usual, making software and optical
> networks and
> handheld operating systems, and Cisco will go back up and...and The Crash
> Was a Good Thing.
>
>
> So why does everybody in Silicon Valley sound so lost? That's really the
> only word for it. Up and down the Valley, you're told that the Crash Was a
> Good Thing and that everything is fine. The strange part is that
> people tell
> you this even when you haven't asked, and the more often you hear it, the
> more worried you're liable to become. At the end of February, for
> instance,
> I set up an appointment with Greg Papadopolous, the chief
> technology officer
> of Sun Microsystems. These days, half the interesting ideas in the Valley
> come out of Sun, so you'd think a guy like Greg would be a sure
> bet to have
> some news about the Next Big Thing. But no sooner had we made our
> introductions than Papadopolous jumped up and started scribbling charts on
> the whiteboard, outlining the geometric growth of this and the exponential
> growth of that in a frantic effort to prove that...the Internet
> ain't dead.
> "We're like arms dealers," Papadopolous said to explain why
> demand for Sun's
> high-powered computers won't fall. "We don't care who's winning as long as
> there is a war."
>
> Apparently some sort of truce was declared shortly thereafter, because
> within two weeks Sun announced that, in fact, sales were falling
> dramatically. This perfectly encapsulates the tenor of life in the Valley
> today. Over and over again you hear from executives and
> scientists and even
> ordinary foot soldiers of the bubble economy that the crash--the salutary
> jolt, the Good Thing--has hit everybody save them. But then
> hardly have you
> had time to close the door behind you when it turns out, as it
> always seems
> to in Stephen King novels, that the monster somehow got inside and is at
> that moment tenderly vivisecting the very characters who just finished
> explaining that it really wasn't worth worrying about.
>
> Jeff Brody, a venture capitalist with Redpoint Ventures, compares
> the range
> of reactions to the bubble's bursting with the psychological
> stages that one
> is reputed to go through after being told that one has contracted an awful
> and potentially terminal illness: "denial, fear, then 'dealing with it.' "
> That doesn't quite tell the whole story, though. It's hard to find someone
> who doesn't say he isn't "dealing with it," but hardly anyone is.
> The Crash
> Was a Good Thing because we'd lost our sense of perspective/been
> overrun by
> greedy investment bankers/forgotten this is all really about
> technology/invested in dumb ideas/thrown too many expensive
> parties--everybody has a reason The Crash Was a Good Thing, but hardly
> anybody has much of an idea what the heck to do next. "When reality sets
> in," one former investment banker now juggling two separate startups told
> me, "you have, as Paul Tillich says [wow! now the heavy theological guns
> come out], existential disappointment. You've got a motivation problem."
>
> It's not just that the money has disappeared. Okay, in some cases
> it is that
> the money has disappeared. Nobody but a few billionaires admits
> to "changing
> lifestyles," but a certain segment of the Valley engaged in purchases that
> were distinctly aspirational--like the $22 million estate down the street
> from Larry Ellison's bought by Edward Kinsey, chief financial officer of
> software maker Ariba, before his stock holdings lost 80% of their
> value. So
> some measure of denial and fear can be tied directly to the potential for
> financial catastrophe.
>
> For a lot more people, however, it's that the story of the past four years
> just doesn't make sense anymore. The brave young MBAs and young mid-level
> line managers...uhh, sorry, entrepreneurs. The engineers who were finally
> supposed to get their due. The much maligned dot-commers, the
> kids supposed
> to be running around the halls of the startups with squirt guns, coding
> HTML. Not to mention the smaller subcategories of Homo siliconsis--the big
> thinkers who painstakingly explained how the boom was going to grow longer
> and boomier, the accountants coming up with whole new ways to "value"
> companies without the faintest hope of earnings, the lawyers who were now
> micro-entrepreneurs, working for slivers of equity. All the people who
> weren't just selling groceries but devising "last-mile plays."
> They had all
> come together, like some band of explorers assembled, as an 18th-century
> document might put it, to "undertake an enterprise of great mutual
> advantage." They sailed out far into the ocean, a strong wind at their
> backs, and when the wind died they were halfway to nowhere.
>
>
> The most obviously adrift are 28-year-old vice presidents, brave
> entrepreneurs, and crisp Stanford-or-equivalent MBAs who made up the upper
> ranks of the dot-com army. Just a year or two ago they were told over and
> over again (sometimes by magazines like this one) that they were the
> nation's hope--the contemporary heirs to the legacy of those strong-limbed
> young men of an earlier century whose one thought was "to do or
> die for God,
> for country, and for Yale." They were the business-casual guys,
> button-down
> shirts, ranging from medium blue to pale cornflower. Many had gone to top
> business schools; others had quit their jobs at
> McKinsey/Microsoft/Procter &
> Gamble.
>
> Suddenly, however, the crash has shorn them of the tufts of
> prestige that so
> recently seemed to sprout vigorously from their ears. "The MBAs might do a
> startup," says Elliott Stein, a recent Stanford grad who returned to the
> U.S. from Israel to live in Palo Alto and work for a dot-com startup, from
> which he was laid off in February. "But really they're the same as a Wall
> Street guy." Being "the same as a Wall Street guy" (which Stein defines as
> "someone else you can't trust") isn't much of a vote of
> confidence anywhere
> in the country outside Manhattan--quite a drop in status for the
> dot-com MBA
> types since the heady days of the bubble.
>
> The dot-com entrepreneurs sense this, and though they are still
> reciting the
> same homilies about the joys of entrepreneurship, something is
> off. They're
> dealing with it by piecing together an ever more baroque narrative of the
> past years, one that keeps them from admitting the obvious: that the game
> they were playing just a year ago doesn't matter anymore.
>
> Take Nirav Tolia. The young chief executive of Epinions.com was a
> minor star
> of the bubble economy, organizing Silicon Valley's Round Zero "networking
> events," rounding up millions of dollars in funding from blue-chip
> investors, and generally being everywhere at once. Now Tolia's company--an
> online consumer advice site--has laid off a quarter of its staff.
> ("There's
> a cognitive dissonance to saying that we're doing so well as a company,"
> admits Tolia, "and also saying that we have to do this.") Now Epinions'
> well-appointed offices just south of San Francisco, whose pricey Herman
> Miller chairs were never filled to capacity, are more than
> two-thirds empty.
> But that's okay, because the whole crash, the whole ugly business
> of laying
> people off, is just another stage in Tolia's development as an
> entrepreneur.
>
> "I called my parents, and I told my father, 'This is too hard. I can't do
> it.' My parents were in India, right after the earthquake. And I realized
> that was real devastation, and here I was freaking out because I
> had to lay
> off some people. My father told me, 'Make sure it's not in vain.
> The way to
> honor the people who helped us is to become successful.'" It's an intimate
> window into the psychology of the economy of diminished
> expectations. Tolia
> learns that it might be hard, but having to lay off some people
> is just one
> more moment in a saga of Internet-era personal growth. It's like Luke
> Skywalker calling Obi-Wan Kenobi and having Obi-Wan tell him that the Dark
> Side might have won a few battles, and wiped out a few planets,
> but it's all
> just part of Luke's progress as a Jedi knight.
>
>
> The strangest part is that when it comes to looking at anything but
> themselves and their own companies, the young dot-com whizzes can be
> extraordinarily cogent. "People who are [laid off] and applying to
> brick-and-mortar companies are bearing the badge of the
> industry's hubris,"
> says Jim Rose, the 29-year-old head of a San Francisco dot-com called
> Mobshop. "Many of their skills," he explains, "are squishy, soft skills.
> There were salespeople without quotas, business development people who had
> Barney relationships with each other--I love you, you love me, but nothing
> happens."
>
> And yet, in the very same conversation, Rose will tell you that his own
> company (yup, he's laid off people too) is doing fine, thank you, because
> it's establishing some really good relationships. "The weird thing that's
> happened in the past three or four months is that our company has
> been doing
> very well while the market continues its slide. We're not having any
> problems getting traction with the people we want to talk to." Listen to
> that again, slowly: Mobshop, an online discounter that's closed
> its virtual
> doors and is hoping to survive by selling software--is doing well because
> he's getting "traction with the people we want to talk to." Not
> really sales
> or customers (he's gotten two since Mobshop "refocused" its mission), but
> traction. No Barney relationships there. No, sir.
>
> That conversation, like the one with Papadopolous, was in its way
> typical of
> the Valley today. For the MBAs, success was the magic three letters, IPO,
> the $40 million of venture capital raised, the stock's first-day
> "pop." And
> now that isn't an option, so you have to move the goal posts. Success is
> coming in and doing a good day's work. Success is being an entrepreneur,
> having meetings, getting traction. Does anybody really believe this?
>
> And then there are the engineers. Even the title is meaningful.
> In the rest
> of the country they would be "programmers," but in Silicon Valley, by long
> tradition, anyone who designs hardware or software gets to be called an
> "engineer," a word of much more impressive weight. The older ones had
> dropped out of college, worked at places like Apple, been doing this stuff
> since the time when you could hold the whole picture of a new machine in
> your head. More were younger: They camped out in the desert for
> the Burning
> Man festival and roamed the aisles of Fry's, the great Silicon
> Valley mecca
> of arcane computer components. A fair number were first-generation
> Americans, and a few were themselves immigrants, sometimes with
> degrees from
> the world's most prestigious engineering schools.
>
> This was supposed to be their...well, not their revolution, but
> their debut
> ball. Of course the Valley had always been about engineering, but the
> engineers--with a few striking exceptions, such as Intel's Robert
> Noyce--worked in relative anonymity. Their paychecks were nothing to scoff
> at, but the rewards were more psychic than financial. Says Darrah, the
> anthropologist, of his early work in Silicon Valley: "The engineers talked
> in almost religious terms about their work--how privileged they were to be
> working on a class of technical problems that only a few people could
> understand."
>
>
> The dot-com culture, to tell the truth, had a distinctly equivocal
> relationship with the engineers who set the whole thing in motion. The
> fabled fringe benefits of the dot-com companies were often of little
> interest to the people doing the hardest work. ("The engineers," notes one
> young employee of a software company called E.piphany, "never
> used the back
> rubs, just the sales and marketing people.") As often as not they were
> shoved into far-off corners of the building, the better to keep
> them out of
> the way of the big shots who could talk more comfortably about "last-mile
> plays" and "media plays." For a few brief moments in the bubble economy,
> however--the second before the MBA with the four-paragraph "business plan"
> became the iconic figure of the bubble economy--the engineers
> were supposed
> to be the ones reaping the fruit of the great economic miracle of
> technology. "[Jim Clark] believed in his bones that the people
> who mattered
> most were the brilliant engineers," the writer Michael Lewis
> rhapsodized in
> his homage to the Stanford professor turned tech tycoon. "He forced [that
> opinion] down Silicon Valley's throat."
>
> It didn't really turn out that way. Though there are certainly
> quite wealthy
> engineers in the Valley, there are more disappointed ones. "The people who
> got rich," sniffs Laura La Gassa, a programmer who worked at several tech
> companies that went public, "were the venture capitalists, who
> were already
> rich anyway; the senior executives, who also were already rich;
> and a few of
> the first hires." But engineers often express a ready contempt for the
> purely mercenary motives of the bubble economy. "The best
> engineers," snorts
> Andy Hertzfeld, the programmer famed for designing the Macintosh's
> user-friendly interface, "are never motivated by money. Whereas business
> people, by definition, are. That's why they're business people."
>
> And still, every time I spoke with programmers in the Valley there was a
> sense of deflated confidence. I had lunch one day with Hertzfeld
> and several
> engineers who worked for him at Eazel, an ambitious operating-systems
> developer Hertzfeld had helped found at the height of the boom. The
> engineers were working on building a user-friendly, easy-to-use front end
> for Linux, the free operating system that incites a striking level of
> passion among software developers. They were true believers. (One key
> difference between engineers and others in the Valley is that nearly
> everyone else is terrified of being thought of as a true believer. "The
> worst thing you can do in the Valley," says professional futurist Paul
> Saffo, "is breathe your own exhaust." The engineers, on the other
> hand, are
> completely unembarrassed about breathing their own exhaust.)
>
> The Eazel team took their jobs seriously--or at least seriously
> enough that
> they could joke about how seriously they took it. "Studying to be a
> minister," quipped senior engineer Don Melton, who had indeed
> studied to be
> a minister, "prepares you well to be an engineering manager. It
> teaches you
> to stand up in front of a group of people and say this is the
> word of God."
> Then the conversation veered into dangerous territory.
>
> Try as they might to stick to talking about the technology, the engineers
> kept turning to "business plans" and "business models." The Eazel
> programmers themselves were working on software that any Linux user could
> get, modify, copy, and distribute absolutely free. The plan was that Eazel
> would eventually make money by selling services like instant updates and
> software help. Two years ago this sounded like a programmer's
> dream job--an
> ambitious, high-prestige project paid for with plenty of venture capital.
> Now it made people nervous. "It seemed like a borderline-crazy business
> plan," observed Maciej Stachowiak, who is one year out of MIT.
> "But I said,
> 'Sure, I'll work on it.' " He was laughing as he said this, but his
> colleagues fidgeted uncomfortably.
>
> I asked many engineers what was truly new and innovative in the
> Valley, but
> hardly anyone could point to a project (other than, of course,
> his own) that
> he would want to be involved with. Even the stars of the programming
> world--the people who might be expected to reel off a list of innovations
> just on the brink of commercialization--were stumped by the prospect of
> naming a new idea. They hemmed and hawed, explained and expanded,
> and mostly
> gave up.
>
> "I hope this doesn't sound like 'Nobody will ever need more than 640K,' "
> said Brian Behlendorf, a widely respected programmer, referring
> to a famous
> (and possibly apocryphal) pronouncement of the young Bill Gates. "But the
> era of the Next Big Thing is over." Coming from the guy who created
> Apache--a heavy-duty piece of software that is one of the marvels of the
> open-source movement, a free program that is more widely used
> than competing
> software sold by Microsoft and Sun for many thousands of
> dollars--his was a
> deeply depressing pronouncement.
>
>
> In the middle of February, I stopped in at a "pink slip" party held at a
> dance club in San Francisco. The party--a "networking event" at
> which (many)
> laid-off dot-commers, identified by red dots on their badges, could try to
> meet (very few) recruiters, identified by green dots--was a neat Hangover
> Era counterpart to the launch parties that not long ago kept half of young
> San Francisco in hors d'oeuvres and martinis. The party was crowded with
> cameras as the press gathered to catalog the species of struggling
> dot-commers--a feeding frenzy that the organizers, who posted an ominous
> sign telling attendees that by walking through the door they consented to
> let their image be used by the "mass media," did their best to encourage.
>
> The reality of Silicon Valley, however, isn't the wall-to-wall trendiness
> that the press can't stop writing about. Several days before the
> media-friendly pink-slip shindig, I had spent an evening with a group of
> young Stanford grads living in a group house in Palo Alto, the
> epicenter of
> the Net boom. Here, too, I heard--in a version perhaps less baldly
> self-serving than that of the dot-com execs--the refrain that the
> crash came
> as something of a relief. Of the seven twentysomethings who lived in the
> house, six worked at Internet companies (or four: One was laid
> off from her
> second dot-flop the day of our meeting; another got the ax the next week).
> Still another, Pius Fisher, had himself helped start an Internet service
> provider that mushroomed to more than 100 employees at the height of the
> dot-com boom before crashing down to earth with a round of layoffs.
>
> The twentysomething dot-commers were well aware that the past two
> years had
> been the most extraordinary aberration. They saw the bubble with
> a practiced
> eye, and on some level were just as happy as their counterparts
> outside the
> dot-com world to see the pretensions of the bubble economy blow
> up. They had
> little tolerance for the Internet entrepreneurs' claims to have reinvented
> business. ("A lot of the people who are proclaiming that they knew a lot
> just got lucky. They were in at the right time," summed up Erin Carlyle,
> herself a public-relations agent working with high-tech companies.) They
> spoke of programmers banished to distant buildings, were more inclined to
> trust in free "open source" software than the commercial products of the
> companies some of them worked for, and were furiously distrustful of the
> legions of MBAs and marketing experts who'd descended on the Valley.
>
> But their skepticism about the values of the Internet bubble did not mask
> the fact that the bubble economy was essentially the only one
> they had ever
> known firsthand. They did not necessarily expect to become rich
> off dot-com
> options, but they also did not seem to know precisely what else
> to expect of
> the vaunted technology economy. They were generally happy with the
> day-to-day routine of work in an economy that quickly gave them serious
> responsibilities, but unlike the earlier generation of Valley engineers,
> they did not feel particularly "privileged" to work in technology. Instead
> they knew a world in which the big score was pretty much the only
> thing that
> the work world offered. "The question of 'What would you do if you had a
> billion dollars?' wasn't just theoretical [for me]," said
> Caroline Carter, a
> technical writer at the software company E.piphany. "It's a
> different world
> now than it was before, when you came out of school and looked
> forward to 45
> years of work."
>
> Katia Koelle, who left graduate school to work at a technology
> company (she
> asked that the company not be named) put the situation of the young
> dot-commers, their friends in technology, and their acquaintances at work
> most succinctly and troublingly. "A lot of people held off on their future
> because they thought things were going to pop." It's an especially apt
> construction for the age of the bubble. It is hard to say if it even means
> anything to people who were not part of it. "Things were going to
> pop" says
> everything and nothing, and yet it is immediately comprehensible
> to everyone
> who works in Silicon Valley today. It refers to a general sense
> that things
> were changing, percolating, and something--maybe the big score, maybe
> something else--was just around the corner. And yet in the
> strange world of
> Silicon Valley after the crash, it is an equally apt image for the weird
> transience of it all.
>
>
> At the height of the Internet mania, I had a conversation with a friend
> who'd started a company then considered "successful" (meaning,
> essentially,
> that it was quickly burning through a great deal of other people's money).
> He told me that he'd gone into business with the thought that we
> were in the
> middle of the gold rush, so he'd do pretty well by selling shovels. There
> was nothing new about this--it was (and still is) one of Silicon Valley's
> favorite cliches. The twist, though, was that the friend, who would prefer
> to stay unnamed, admitted that neither he nor anybody around him had felt
> really contented "selling shovels," the cutesy name for selling
> services to
> all the patsies hoping to make money in the Internet boom. People, he
> explained, started off with the idea of selling shovels, but they saw so
> much digging for gold that they started wondering if there indeed was gold
> in those hills. And so instead of selling shovels, they started
> buying them
> and digging for gold themselves, even though no one was certain that there
> was really any gold there.
>
> That story is still my favorite parable of Internet insanity. Much of the
> country outside Silicon Valley believes--with some justification--that the
> Internet frenzy was an elaborate con, devised by some sharp Valley money
> managers (the legendary VCs) to suck up a disproportionate share of the
> national wealth. It seems too much to believe that so many people in the
> Valley had succeeded with great efficiency at the bizarre enterprise of
> conning themselves.
>
> But that, in fact, was the case. It was just too tempting. (Full
> disclosure:
> At one point, while working for a magazine covering the Internet
> industry, I
> even considered "doing" my own startup; I was motivated primarily by the
> money and never pretended that I wanted to do it so that "I would have
> something to say when my grandchildren asked me what I did in the Net
> revolution.") Everybody knew the crash would come, but nobody cared.
>
> "Life in the Valley is always painted in terms of risk," Charles
> Darrah, the
> anthropologist, told me, sitting in a coffee shop not far from Stanford
> University. "But what's the risk [for the Internet startup guys]? That in
> the worst case the guy will wind up sitting in front of a restaurant like
> this two years later, back on his feet and making more money than ever?"
>
> The probability, of course, is that, indeed, in two years or three, the
> Internet gold-rush guys and the engineers and even many of the dot-commers
> will be sitting outside cafes like that one, making more money than ever.
> Let us assume that they will then still be saying, The Crash Was a Good
> Thing. Let us hope, though, that by that point they will be able to say it
> with greater conviction--or at least less frequently.
---- Adam@KnowNow.ComOpen source is fine, but the Internet merged with the commercial world seven years ago. To say that open source created today's Internet is to ignore TeachText, Notepad, BBEdit, Homesite, FrontPage, Pagemill, Winamp, Windows, Mac OS, Google, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Outlook, Flash, PhotoShop, Eudora, Netscape, Opera, MSIE, the AOL client, ICQ, AOL IM, Visual Studio, Metrowerks, Napster, Vignette, Dreamweaver, Manila, Blogger, Sven, the list goes on and on. None of these projects are open source. About all you can say is that today's Internet was developed by developers. You can't say it was done by open source developers. It may have been true at one time, but it no longer is. Another one for you to consider. XML-RPC and SOAP were created by commercial developers. Another BTW, HyperCard was not open source either, and it's often credited as part of TimBL's inspiration. -- http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/03/10
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:14:00 PDT