‘The Internet Tidal Wave,’ 20 years on

Twenty years ago this week, Bill Gates sent a lengthy internal memorandum to senior staff at Microsoft Corporation, announcing an embrace of the Internet that was to help shape the digital landscape of the second half of the 1990s.

The memorandum confirmed that Gates and Microsoft were late in recognizing the promise of the Internet and helped prod the software giant to confront the swaggering upstart, Netscape Communications Corporation, maker of an eponymous and highly popular Web browser.

The memorandum was dated May 26, 1995, and bore the title, “The Internet Tidal Wave.” It surfaced a few years later in the U.S. government’s antitrust lawsuit that accused Microsoft of uncompetitive practices in vanquishing Netscape in the “browser war” that began later in 1995.

“The Internet Tidal Wave” in recent years has been called “an epic manifesto of sorts,” but it embraced many of the themes that had been reverberating for months in Silicon Valley. Not only was the memorandum an acknowledgement that Microsoft needed to catch up quickly, it confirmed that Gates’ thinking about the Internet had been off-target.

As I note in my latest book, 1995: The Year the Future Began, Gates “mistakenly thought the Internet was just a precursor to some sort of elaborate, multidimensional information superhighway. He said as much in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead.

Gates’ memorandum represents an intriguing and rather detailed assessment of the state of the Internet, and its emerging capabilities, in 1995.

“I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of its importance,” Gates wrote of the Internet, adding:

“Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance. In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every part of our business. The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981.”

He noted how little Microsoft content was then available on the World Wide Web. “Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats,” Gates wrote. “After 10 hours of browsing, I had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows .EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format. I did see a great number of [Apple] Quicktime files. All of the movie studios use them to offer film trailers.”

He also wrote: “Amazingly it is easier to find information on the Web than it is to find information on the Microsoft Corporate Network.”

Gates identified an important aspect of the Web, one that was recognizable even 20 years ago, during its emergence into mainstream consciousness. “It has enough users that it is benefiting from the positive feedback loop of the more users it gets, the more content it gets, and the more content it gets, the more users it gets,” he wrote. “I encourage everyone on the executive staff and their direct reports to use the Internet.”

Gates identified Netscape as a threat, referring to the upstart as a “new competitor ‘born’ on the Internet” whose Web browser “is dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network extensions will catch on. … They have attracted a number of public network operators to use their platform to offer information and directory services.

“We have to match and beat their offerings ….”

In the memorandum’s closing paragraph, Gates declared:

“The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules.”

Of course it did not significantly alter antitrust laws, which a federal court found that Microsoft had violated in taking on Netscape during the second half of the 1990s.

The federal government in 1998 brought an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, claiming the company had engaged in an anticompetitive practices by bundling its Web browser, Internet Explorer, with Windows 95 operating software. Doing so placed Netscape at a competitive disadvantage, as the government charged and a federal judge agreed.

The ruling came in April 2000, too late to save Netscape. By then, the trajectory of its meteoric rise and fall had been completed: Netscape had decisively lost the “browser war” to Microsoft and in November 1998 was acquired by America Online.

WJC

More from The 1995 Blog:

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• Talking Internet history, and 1995
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• Closing off Pennsylvania Avenue: 1995 and a psychology of fear
  
• Recalling the ‘coolness’ of the early Web
• Anniversaries, controversies for Amazon.com
• Saluting the unassuming wiki, 20 years after its launch
• What did the ’90s mean?
• The ’90s deserve better
• Why 1995?
• Talking 1995