| Monday, August 12, 2002 |
16:46 - The Beleaguered Innovator
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The year was 1998. The Internet had reached maturity, or at least was progressing well through its awkward adolescence. All the familiar pieces were there: e-commerce, corporate sites with stock quotes, Web-based discussion boards, spam. It was the Internet of today, give or take a few million users-- and a widely-used browser or two.
Netscape was in a bad way. After hurtling to stardom with successive major releases being hustled out the door every few months, each one packed full of brand-new and desperately-needed page layout features such as background colors/images, tables, frames, and the like, the browser-- which had enjoyed almost total penetration across the Internet population-- had been brought to a standstill by Internet Explorer 4. Upon that browser's release, everything changed. The stakes were entirely different. The same old tactics would no longer suffice. Suddenly it was a fight for survival, not a frantic but exhilarating race to get new features into common usage, flinging them out like alms over the piazza. It was now deadly serious. IE4 was the browser world's 9/11.
Almost immediately, Netscape lost its way and began to flounder. As the free IE4 began to take root, and as Windows 98 began to ship with a preinstalled copy of "The Internet" on every desktop (rendering Netscape's $60 price tag ridiculous by comparison), Netscape started to stagger and crash into walls like a blindfolded dog recovering from surgery. Gone, almost overnight, were the new features that were created as a response to overwhelming clamor from the users, features with a massive popular mandate for existence. Now the key was not functionality, but survival-- and so Netscape started to cast about.
Remember the whole "Push" campaign? How browsers would integrate with your desktop and send you data unbidden, so that your entire machine would turn into a giant interactive web page-- or, more accurately, a giant interactive billboard? It would be like computing inside an ad. Your desktop wouldn't be a static picture of flowers or your car or whatever-- it would be a live Web document with links, ad banners, little games to play, everything. Microsoft's version was called Active Desktop. Netscape partnered with Marimba for theirs.
It was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, as revolutionary as tables or frames, or indeed as the browser was in the first place. But everybody looked at it, raised their eyebrows, and yawned. Push fell flat; neither company won. Active Desktop still exists in Windows, but I don't know a single person who uses it.
At the same time, there was the big DHTML/Layers thing. Layers were supposed to be the other Next Big Thing; they would make pages come alive, with dynamic in-frame content that could turn websites into fully functional applications. (Sort of like what we can do today in Flash.) It was a bold idea, but the implementations were far too cumbersome for anybody to get their minds around-- Netscape's and Microsoft's implementations of DHTML were incompatible and had complementary shortcomings, and nobody could code to a fully working standard. Besides, there just wasn't a public mandate for it, not like there was for tables or for background colors or for CSS. And DHTML died the same death as VRML: it seemed like a good idea at the time, but all it did was to send Netscape on a wild goose chase while they tried to head off Microsoft. And they succeeded. They kept Microsoft from winning in the DHTML or VRML or Push battles. Huzzah.
But the damage had been done. The vision that drove the creation of the Internet had been destroyed, taken corporate. It was now about marketing, about demographics, about product placement, about mindshare, about market penetration, about brand loyalty. It was no longer about creating functionality and features to empower wide-eyed Web geeks creating their first tentative pages about skateboarding or their favorite movies. That was all over. Because while Microsoft had led Netscape on with the illusion that what the public wanted was more new features that were as exciting as in the early days of the Web, what they were slyly doing in the background was to integrate the browser into Windows.
Netscape released a new major version about every six months, from 1995 through 1998, until version 4.0 came out. and now, in 2002, four years later, we barely have anything that can be called a successor to it.
And neither does Microsoft.
What major new empowering features has Microsoft added into IE since it became the de facto standard? Some vaguely improved CSS handling, sure; maybe some speed enhancements. But what has changed since IE4 that honestly gives us new abilities in our use of the Web as a publishing medium?
As if. IE still doesn't even have a "Show Page Info" equivalent or a JavaScript debugger. (How the hell are you supposed to write JavaScript without a JavaScript debugger, anyway?) It doesn't even have cookie management.
Which brings me to the crux of this diatribe, the feature that I just remembered suddenly last night, and which seemed now so disheartening in its tragic optimism, its violins-on-the-deck-of-the-Titanic unquenchable hopefulness that kept Netscape's vision alive right up to the very end, not unlike Bill Biggart and his D30, knowing he was doomed, but doggedly doing what he believed in anyway, right up until the masonry started crashing down.
That feature was a new technology whose name I forget-- LiveFace or RealFont or Dynamic Fonts or something-- that enabled Web developers to embed their own custom fonts into their web pages. It would be included as just another binary file to download-- a font doesn't take up much more than 50K or so, no more than your typical image file; and once it was downloaded, the browser would integrate it in-place and apply it to the text in the page. The author could include and refer to as many of these fonts as he wanted, in the same kind of structure as CSS. You wouldn't have to install the fonts in question onto your computer; you wouldn't even have to know the fonts were even there. They would be contained entirely within the browser's run-time space, and unloaded when the browser quit.
The way I remember seeing the demo page at Netscape's site working, it would lay out the entire site, and all the text would be shown in the default browser font; but then, as soon as the new font was fully downloaded, suddenly all the text would re-render smoothly into the new font, gorgeously reflowed with full kerning and leading and everything, just the way the author intended it.
This was all part of a thrust by Netscape to turn the Web into a legitimate publishing medium with real page-layout control, so people could be sure that the pages they presented would be viewed by everybody exactly the same way-- fonts and all. It was a fairly wide-reaching initiative; it wasn't just the dynamic fonts thing. It also included stuff like a "columns" specification, so you could write a big block of text and have the browser automatically render it into two or three or n columns for you, across the page, without having to worry about creating tables and splitting the text manually between the cells. (It would have been a godsend for text-heavy content that would normally get laid out in multi-column formats in print; instead, what we have now in online news services and journals and blogs are gigantic narrow single-column articles that thread their way downward between columns full of ads and links.) The new initiative also included tags to specify gutter spacing, margins, headers and footers, text wrapping around images-- in short, it would have turned the Web into a full-fledged deterministic page-layout medium. The demo page showed a newsletter-style page with two columns, ornate graphics in the gutters, a beautiful headline block, bylines, headings, initial-caps, the whole nine yards. It looked like the future, in a way that crap like Push or VRML never looked like anything remotely compellling. And it would have been available to everybody. I believe they even included a free tool which would convert any TrueType font into the format needed by the dynamic-fonts engine.
But it didn't catch on, because by the time it appeared, Netscape was irrelevant. And Microsoft has celebrated their victory over this kind of innovation by... making sure that four years later, we have no such functionality available to us.
Think of what it could have meant. Lileks could whip up a gorgeous new layout format for his Bleats, and by tagging on the fonts he used in the new dynamic-font format, he could be sure that every one of his readers would see it as he himself saw it, unless they'd specifically set their browsers to override with their own custom fonts. USS Clueless could ensure that all the relevant header text would appear in the Trekkish "Handel Gothic" font, without Steven having to link separately to the TrueType editions of that font that people currenly have to download, install, restart their browsers, and return to the site in order to see it the way the author intended. It would all "just work".
But that dream is gone now, and we're unlikely to see anything like it again, or at least not for years. The Web has matured in an environment patently unfriendly to such innovation. The time for empowerment ended with Netscape still giddily pulling rabbits out of its hat, on a crumbling stage in a theater burning to the ground.
As I've said before, innovation is the enemy of Microsoft-- it's not just that Redmond is incapable of innovating, it's that innovation is patently bad for business. They have to be able to appease their stockholders with a product that they can get away with changing and improving as little as possible, as little as they can get away with. Why should they innovate? Innovation costs money. If they could sell the same product, materially unchanged, for thirty years-- they would. That's business. And when you're a monopoly, and when innovation is seen as irrelevant as far as the public is concerned, coming up with new capabilities to deliver into your customers' hands-- new things to go wrong, new things to have to support, new complexities to add to your software-- is the last thing you want to do.
When an industry like technology solidifies, it becomes a lot more friendly to investment and to traditional business that expects the products to behave like corn flakes and detergent. Computers don't do that yet. But browsers are starting to, and that's why now that the frivolous dot-coms are gone, we've winnowed the field down to e-commerce companies that have genuinely viable business plans in a traditional sense. They can expect browsers to behave a certain way, because for some four years now there's only been one browser of note, and it's been effectively unchanged in all that time.
But because Netscape was willfully destroyed before their web-publishing initiative was fully realized, an entire arm of that potential business has been lost to us. Imagine what blogging could have been like in a world where we had that kind of layout control. Imagine what e-zines would have been like. Imagine what new fields would have been opened up by enterprising pioneers who saw an opportunity afforded by this new technological foundation, picked it up, and ran with it.
That's the kind of crime for which I will never forgive Microsoft. They are actively hostile to innovation, purely because of what they are. It is in their interest to stifle innovation. It is their goal to own an industry-- to buy up or smother the companies competing in that field, become a monopoly, and then never innovate again. The money doth flow like never before-- but progress ceases.
But because this leaves a niche open, it's up to the beleaguered underdogs with the small market shares to do the inventing. Innovation always happens first and best with companies like Apple, because they have to innovate in order to survive.
The problem is that such a position is untenable from a business standpoint. Success and failure are separated by a day's worth of work or sales or product announcements, and failure is forever.
I know it makes me old-fashioned and unrealistic to be rooting for the innovative underdog in a given field; they're bound to become irrelevant and die, and we may as well just get with the program and accept the realities of the monopoly-controlled industry. Sure, it won't ever innovate again in that field, but at least investors can make some money off it.
Maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic. Maybe I'm an idealistic dunderhead. Maybe I just can't bear the thought that the ultimate fate of any scrappy entrepreneur, ingeniously inventing, following the American Dream, is to become agglomerated into a monolithic and ossified industry, devoid of personality or energy, focused only upon market share and revenue, rather than on serving-- and delighting-- the customer.
Whatever the case, I'll keep waving the flag as high as I can-- lest it drop from people's sight and we lose yet more of the magical world of invention.
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