The Web is the Next Platform, 5/27/1995 – Ben Slivka

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by benslivka

Posted on August 15, 2017April 12, 2021

I started working full-time on what became Internet Explorer 1.0 in early October, 1994, grew the engineering team to 67 individuals by the time we shipped IE 3.0 in August, 1996, and got very little sleep (I worked 80-100 hours/week for 17 of the 22 months I led the IE team).

There were (naturally) a lot of discussions within Microsoft about the future of the Internet, and I found myself with a lot of opinions, so I wrote this 17 page memo to crystallize my thinking (and share it with a wider audience) in preparation for a Microsoft "Internet Offsite" held in early June, 1995.

In my executive Summary at the start of my memo, I wrote a very stark opening sentence —  to make sure there was no mistaking my point of view:

The Web (as I will loosely refer to the Internet and it’s evolving data formats and protocols) exists today as a collection of technologies that deliver some interesting solutions today, and will grow rapidly in the coming years into a full-fledged platform that will rival — and even surpass — Microsoft Windows.

As you might imagine, BillG, SteveB, and others were not delighted that I was predicting the eventual decline of Windows a few months before we shipped Windows 95. 🙂

I wrapped up my executive Summary as follows:

I will try to make and support the following key points in the rest of this memo:

The Web is an application platform (complete with APIs, data formats, and protocols) that threatens Windows — many corporate developers and ISVs could develop and deliver their solutions more quickly, to a wider audience, with the Web than they can with Windows or MSN as it exists today.

If Microsoft is to influence the Web, we must have broad, standards-based Web support in our products — we have to be the product supplier of choice for all key existing Web technologies — clients, servers, and publishing tools, at a minimum.

Once we have market and mind share on the Web with our products, we can take a leadership role in expanding and shaping the Web .

6/19/2019 Update : There was at least one prediction I got quite wrong in 1995: Cloud Computing!

In "7. Business Opportunities on the Web", I attempted to list "all the money-making areas on the Web". One was "Server Farms", which I gave a priority of 2, which I defined as "Lower priority areas we might make tactical investments in to ‘prime the pump’, but we would probably not seek to gain large market share.")  And I described "Server Farms" as "A phone/cable company business — just leasing disk space, CPU cycles, and bandwidth to customers to put up their content. Margins are probably not high."

As of June, 2019, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are the top providers of what we now call "cloud infrastructure" — much more sophisticated than the simple "disk space, CPU cycles, and bandwidth" I imagined in 1995.

For Q1 2019, AWS had $7.6B revenue (up 41% over Q1 2018), Azure had $3.4B (up 75%), and Google had $2.3B (up 83%). And while I wrote "Margins are probably not high", for Q1 2019, AWS operating income was $2.2B — representing about 50% of Amazon’s overall operating income (retail has very low margins), with an operating margin of 29%!

Here is the full first section from my memo, and you are welcome to read the full 17 page PDF at your leisure.

1.1. Why is the Web a Threat to Windows?

The Web today is a rapidly maturing application delivery platform — you can shop for and buy wine, play hangman, Rubik’s cube, and chess, read and augment conversation threads, check up-to-date weather forecasts and stock prices, read the latest news headlines, get dealer costs for cars, look up 1-800 phone numbers, download movie trailers, music clips from major recording labels, look up zip codes based on addresses, get real-time photographs from San Francisco and U. of Washington, and order food from restaurants in 8 different cities. And these are all done with a simple HTML 2.0 web viewer (like Netscape, Mosaic, or our Internet Explorer)!

You can also conduct a phone call with anyone anywhere else in the world (“internet phone”, just CB radio quality now, but that will improve), read USENET news groups (NNTP), join a chat session (Internet Relay Chat), join a 3D chat session (Worlds Away), and hear streaming, low-quality audio (RealAudio — ex-MS folks robg, philba, martind).

My nightmare scenario is that the Web grows into a rich application platform in an operating system-neutral way, and then a company like Siemens or Matsushita comes out with a $500 “WebMachine” that attaches to a TV. This WebMachine will let the customer do all the cool Internet stuff, plus manage home finances (all the storage is at the server side), and play games. When faced with the choice between a $500 box (RISC CPU, 4-8Mb RAM, no hard disk, …) and a $2KPentium/P6 Windows machine, the 2/3rds of homes that don’t have...