The Other Road Ahead - Part 2
We launched on under $10,000, and it would be even cheaper today. We had to spend thousands on a server, and thousands more to get SSL. (The only company selling SSL software at the time was Netscape.) Now you can rent a much more powerful server, with SSL included, for less than we paid for bandwidth alone. You could launch a Web-based application now for less than the cost of a fancy office chair.
As for building something users love, here are some general tips. Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to the users as you do. The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add. The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.
Don't get complacent if your competitors' software is lame; the standard to compare your software to is what it could be, not what your current competitors happen to have. Use your software yourself, all the time. Viaweb was supposed to be an online store builder, but we used it to make our own site too. Don't listen to marketing people or designers or product managers just because of their job titles. If they have good ideas, use them, but it's up to you to decide; software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.
Now let's talk about competition. What you're afraid of is not presumably groups of hackers like you, but actual companies, with offices and business plans and salesmen and so on, right? Well, they are more afraid of you than you are of them, and they're right.
It's a lot easier for a couple of hackers to figure out how to rent office space or hire sales people than it is for a company of any size to get software written. I've been on both sides, and I know. When Viaweb was bought by Yahoo, I suddenly found myself working for a big company, and it was like trying to run through waist-deep water.
I don't mean to disparage Yahoo. They had some good hackers, and the top management were real butt-kickers. For a big company, they were exceptional. But they were still only about a tenth as productive as a small startup. No big company can do much better than that. What's scary about Microsoft is that a company so big can develop software at all. They're like a mountain that can walk.
Don't be intimidated. You can do as much that Microsoft can't as they can do that you can't. And no one can stop you. You don't have to ask anyone's permission to develop Web-based applications.
You don't have to do licensing deals, or get shelf space in retail stores, or grovel to have your application bundled with the OS. You can deliver software right to the browser, and no one can get between you and potential users without preventing them from browsing the Web.
You may not believe it, but I promise you, Microsoft is scared of you. The complacent middle managers may not be, but Bill is, because he was you once, back in 1975, the last time a new way of delivering software appeared.
Notes
[1] Realizing that much of the money is in the services, companies building lightweight clients have usually tried to combine the hardware with an online service. This approach has not worked well, partly because you need two different kinds of companies to build consumer electronics and to run an online service, and partly because users hate the idea.
Giving away the razor and making money on the blades may work for Gillette, but a razor is much smaller commitment than a Web terminal. Cell phone handset makers are satisfied to sell hardware without trying to capture the service revenue as well. That should probably be the model for Internet clients too. If someone just sold a nice-looking little box with a Web browser that you could use to connect through any ISP, every technophobe in the country would buy one.
[2] Security always depends more on not screwing up than any design decision, but the nature of server-based software will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up. Compromising a server could cause such damage that ASPs (that want to stay in business) are likely to be careful about security.
[3] In 1995, when we started Viaweb, Java applets were supposed to be the technology everyone was going to use to develop server-based applications. Applets seemed to us an old-fashioned idea.
Download programs to run on the client? Simpler just to go all the way and run the programs on the server. We wasted little time on applets, but countless other startups must have been lured into this tar pit. Few can have escaped alive, or Microsoft could not have gotten away with dropping Java in the most recent version of Explorer.
[4] This point is due to Trevor Blackwell, who adds "the cost of writing software goes up more than linearly with its size. Perhaps this is mainly due to fixing old bugs, and the cost can be more linear if all bugs are found quickly."
[5] The hardest kind of bug to find may be a variant of compound bug where one bug happens to compensate for another. When you fix one bug, the other becomes visible. But it will seem as if the fix is at fault, since that was the last thing you changed.
[6] Within Viaweb we once had a contest to describe the worst thing about our software. Two customer support people tied for first prize with entries I still shiver to recall.
We fixed both problems immediately.
[7] Robert Morris wrote the ordering system, which shoppers used to place orders. Trevor Blackwell wrote the image generator and the manager, which merchants used to retrieve orders, view statistics, and configure domain names etc. I wrote the editor, which merchants used to build their sites. The ordering system and image generator were written in C and C++, the manager mostly in Perl, and the editor in Lisp.
[8] Price discrimination is so pervasive (how often have you heard a retailer claim that their buying power meant lower prices for you?) that I was surprised to find it was outlawed in the U.S. by the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936. This law does not appear to be vigorously enforced.
[9] In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that clothing brands favored by "urban youth" do not try too hard to prevent shoplifting because in their target market the shoplifters are also the fashion leaders.
[10] Companies often wonder what to outsource and what not to. One possible answer: outsource any job that's not directly exposed to competitive pressure, because outsourcing it will thereby expose it to competitive pressure.
[11] The two guys were Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. Dan wrote a prototype in Basic in a couple days, then over the course of the next year they worked together (mostly at night) to make a more powerful version written in 6502 machine language. Dan was at Harvard Business School at the time and Bob nominally had a day job writing software. "There was no great risk in doing a business," Bob wrote, "If it failed it failed. No big deal."
[12] It's not quite as easy as I make it sound. It took a painfully long time for word of mouth to get going, and we did not start to get a lot of press coverage until we hired a PR firm (admittedly the best in the business) for $16,000 per month.
However, it was true that the only significant channel was our own Web site.
[13] If the Mac was so great, why did it lose? Cost, again. Microsoft concentrated on the software business, and unleashed a swarm of cheap component suppliers on Apple hardware. It did not help, either, that suits took over during a critical period.
[14] One thing that would help Web-based applications, and help keep the next generation of software from being overshadowed by Microsoft, would be a good open-source browser. Mozilla is open-source but seems to have suffered from having been corporate software for so long. A small, fast browser that was actively maintained would be a great thing in itself, and would probably also encourage companies to build little Web appliances.
Among other things, a proper open-source browser would cause HTTP and HTML to continue to evolve (as e.g. Perl has).
It would help Web-based applications greatly to be able to distinguish between selecting a link and following it; all you'd need to do this would be a trivial enhancement of HTTP, to allow multiple urls in a request. Cascading menus would also be good.
If you want to change the world, write a new Mosaic. Think it's too late? In 1998 a lot of people thought it was too late to launch a new search engine, but Google proved them wrong. There is always room for something new if the current options suck enough. Make sure it works on all the free OSes first-- new things start with their users.
[15] Trevor Blackwell, who probably knows more about this from personal experience than anyone, writes:
"I would go farther in saying that because server-based software is so hard on the programmers, it causes a fundamental economic shift away from large companies. It requires the kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they will only be willing to provide when it's their own company.
Software companies can hire skilled people to work in a not-too-demanding environment, and can hire unskilled people to endure hardships, but they can't hire highly skilled people to bust their asses. Since capital is no longer needed, big companies have little to bring to the table."
[16] In the original version of this essay, I advised avoiding Javascript. That was a good plan in 2001, but Javascript now works.
Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Ken Anderson, and Dan Giffin for reading drafts of this paper; to Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston for information about VisiCalc; and again to Ken Anderson for inviting me to speak at BBN.
You'll find this essay and 14 others in Hackers & Painters.
