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Follow UsWhat's the biggest event impacting human civilization in the twentieth
century? While the
World War, man's landing on moon, the rise and fall of
the advent of computers and more particularly PCs, women suffrage, the
discovery of penicillin, understanding the DNA structure would be some
popular choices (leaving aside frivolous ones like coming together of
the Beatles or the designing of the brassiere, a biomechanical wonder),
there are many who would select the coming of the Internet (or the
Wide Web or dotcom) as the landmark option.
The story of ARPANET and US Defense being the precursor to Internet is
well documented at many places. But what ignited the birth of the
consumer Internet was the registration of the first .com domain
by Symbolics in March 1985. The .com domain was initially run by the US
Department of Defense only till 1991, till Network Solutions took
over-subsequently Network Solutions was bought over by
For a while, it was fashionable to include the .com in company names,
though this became less popular after the bursting of "dot com bubble".
Sun
Microsystems even used the tagline: “We're the Dot in Dotcom”. To
commemorate the silver jubilee, Verisign would be leading an
industry-wide initiative beginning in March 2010 to recognize the
innovators and leaders that have shaped the first 25 years of .com and
in doing so transformed our economy and society. Dotcom would not be
what it is today without these early innovators who paved the way for
Internet.
As part of this celebration, VeriSign will soon announce the top 75
people and companies who have made the most notable impact in shaping
the Internet and ultimately, our world. From this list, a distinguished
panel comprised of some of the Internet's most important influencers,
will select the “.com 25.” Winners of the .com 25 will be announced at
a gala event later this spring in San Francisco.
We at Dataquest too have done our selection of 25-ranging from
luminaries who founded the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook to the
founder of Ethernet to the founder of World Wide Web. The point of
interest is to see how much our list matches with the Verisign one.
Omidyar: eBay Founder
Fiancee Made him a Billionaire
This French born Armenian-Iranian entrepreneur was 28 when he sat down
over a long holiday weekend to write the original computer code for
what eventually became a dotcom superbrand - the auction site eBay. The
word 'eBay' was made up on the fly by Omidyar when he was told that his
first choice for his web site, 'echobay,' had already been registered.
Not wanting to make a second trip to Sacramento, he came up with
'eBay.' Apparently, eBay was founded to help Omidyar's fiancée
trade Pez candy dispensers. Remarkably, eBay was profitable since it
began in 1996 and as the largest site for e-commerce it became a dotcom
blockbuster. A successful eBay IPO in 1998 turned Omidyar into a
billionaire, who now with his wife runs the philanthropic investment
firm Omidyar Networks.
Meg Whitman: ex-eBay CEO
Penny Wise Auctioneer
If Omidyar conceived and founded eBay, it was Whitman who nurtured it
to make it the world's largest marketplace where you can buy and
sell...almost anything. And unlike most dotcoms that tried to turn the
Net into TV or the mall, Whitman tapped into its root appeal,
communications, letting people trade among themselves. And in contrast
to many dotcoms, she pinched pennies from the start. From 30 employees
and $4mn in revenues when she joined in 1998, Whitman helped eBay grow
to 15,000 employees and $8bn in revenues by the time she resigned in
2008. Repeatedly named by Fortune as one of the top 5 most powerful
women, Whitman is a Republican candidate for California Governor in
November 2010.
Steve Case:
Founder
Failure too a Case Study
This former Pizza Hut marketing manager first realized the potential of
a mass online service when in 1991 he co-founded America Online (AOL)
from Quantum, his online services company. Not only he brought the new
service to 1 million subscribers by 1994, he pioneered several online
interactive games and titles for over a decade till he presided over
the $164bn merger with media giant Time Warner in January 2000. While
at that time Case was sitting atop the most poweful empire of new and
old media, the merger quickly ran into trouble during the dotcom bust,
compounded by accounting scandals. The failure of the AOL-Time Warner
merger is the subject of MBA courses, but even that accentuates Case as
one of the dotcom icons.
Jeff Bezos:
founder
The Virtual Bookseller
You may be the Bibliophile with an eye for that rare edition or an
affocianado who always likes to pick up the global first edition,
chances are that you have to log in to Amazon to fulfil your wishes.
Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 after making a cross country drive from
New York to Seattle, writing up the Amazon business plan on the way and
setting up the original company in his garage. Known for his attention
to minute business process details-often described as at once a
happy-go-lucky mogul and a notorious micromanager. ... an executive who
wants to know about everything from contract minutiae to how he is
quoted in all Amazon press releases-- Bezos is also the brains behind
Kindle, motivated by the strategy that Amazon would soon sell more
e-books than virtual books.
Berners Lee: World Wide Web inventor
www.timbernerslee......
One of Time magazine's 100 most important people of the 20th century,
Sir Timothy John Berners Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide
Web, making the first proposal for it in March 1989. On 25 December
1990, he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP
client and server via the Internet. That makes him the British answer
to Neil Armstrong-if the latter expanded the human universe with his
first foray to the Moon, Berners Lee brought everything closer when the
first website was put online at CERN on August 6, 1991 and the
WorldWide Web consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994 at MIT.
Incidentally, he later admitted that the forward slashes ("//") in a
web address were actually unnecessary-- “it seemed like a good idea at
the time.”
Andreessen: Netscape founder
Poster-boy Turned Crusader
During his undergraduation at University of Illinois, Andressen along
with a co-worker created the Mosaic web browser and subsequently
started the Mosaic Communications in 1993. The University of
Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name; hence
Mosaic Communications changed its name to Netscape Communications, and
its flagship web browser became Netscape Navigator. Netscape's IPO in
1995 propelled Andreessen into the public's imagination and its success
attracted Microsoft's attention. While Andressen became the poster-boy
wunderkid of the Internet bubble generation, Microsoft licensed the
Mosaic source code from Spyglass (an offshoot of the University of
Illinois), and turned it into Internet Explorer The resulting battle
between the two companies became known as the Broweser Wars. While
Netscape was later sold to AOL, Andressen also founded Opsware, later
sold to HP.
Zuckerberg: Facebook founder
The Man Who Monetized Socializing
Being dumped by his girlfriend Erica prompted Zuckerberg to invent a
social networking site called Facemash from his Harvard dorm in
February 2004, which rated women as “whether hot or not”. Facemash
became Facebook following a few modifications with the idea coming from
his days at Phillips Exeter Academy which had a long-standing tradition
of publishing an annual student directory with headshot photos of all
students, faculty and staff known as the "Facebook". Zuckerberg's
Facebook started off as just a "Harvard-thing", until he decided to
spread it to Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Cornell, Yale and
others. Finally, he moved to Palo Alto and over the summer of 2004,
Facebook was launched as a corporate entity. After several lawsuits by
his co-founders, in 2007 Facebook sold 1.6% stake to Microsoft for
$240mn. With over 350 mn users Facebook is the face of social
networking-in fact a Zuckerberg biopic is slated for release in 2010.
Shawn Fanning:
They Took Away his Music
While working summers at his uncle's Internet company Chess.net,
Fanning started writing the code for Napster, a program that could
provide an easy way for downloading music. The system was launched in
1999-with it was born the peer-to-peer system; for millions of netizens
around the world it meant free music. Soon after, however, Napster was
the target of several music industry-backed lawsuits, which ultimately
ended up causing the cessation of the service. Best Buy purchased
Napster in a line of succession from companies such as Roxio, and
Sony-BMG. Though Napster lost the case, the concept started by him led
to the initiation of numerous other similar softwares such as Morpheus
and BitTorrent. Incidentally, in a cameo appearance in The Italian Job
where Fanning played himself, he was accused by Seth Green's character
of stealing Napster from him while he was taking a nap.
Bhatia: Hotmail founder
The Hot Male?
While working on the concept of a web-based database in a startup
called Firepower Systems, Bhatia realized the potential of a web-based
e-mail system and thus decided to create one called HoTMaiL (the
uppercase letters spelling out HTML-- the language used to write the
base of a webpage). In order to attract attention, the e-mail service
was provided for free and revenue was obtained through the advertising
on the website. Draper Fisher Ventures invested $300,000 on the project
and the service was launched on July 4, 1996. The concept of free
e-mail was born-perhaps Internet's biggest ever contribution to human
civilization. In less than six months, the website attracted over 1
million subscribers. As the interest in the web-based email provider
increased, Microsoft eventually took notice and on December 30, 1997
(Bhatia's 29th birthday), Hotmail was sold to Microsoft for a reported
sum of $400 million. Though Bhatia ventured into several other projects
subsequently, he never managed the same limelight again-not even
reports of his impending marriage to Aishwarya Rai.
Jack Dorsey:
founder
Not Only Birds Tweet
In Oakland in 2000, Dorsey started his company to dispatch couriers,
taxis, and emergency services from the Web. Building on dispatching and
inspired in part by LiveJournal and possibly by AOL Instant Messenger,
he got the idea at this time for realtime status communication. He
decided that SMS text suited the status message idea better and built a
prototype for Twitter in two weeks. He co-founded Obvious, a podcasting
startup which then spun off into Twitter. As CEO, Dorsey saw the
startup through two rounds of VC funding-though improving uptime was
initially given more priority over generating revenues, considering its
universal popularity now Twitter is looking at channels to menetize it
now. Meanwhile Dorsey has now gone Square, a mobile payment startup
that allows iPhone to accept credit card payments.
Leonard Bosack/Sandy Lerner:
founders
The Networking Couple
Credit for the ubiquitous router (no Internet without that) should go
to the colorful couple Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner (she was the
first to appear nude in a business magazine Forbes). Apparently, Lerner
and and her-then boyfriend and ex-husband Bosack designed the first
router so that they could connect the incompatible computer systems of
the Stanford offices they were working in to send love letters to each
other. By the end of 1984, they had formed Cisco Systems (after San
Francisco) and begun manufacturing routers in their living room. In
1986, Bosack resigned from Stanford amid allegations of impropriety to
work at Cisco full time. That year, they received funding of $2.5
million from Sequoia Capital after 77 unsuccessful proposals to other
VCs. Between 1984 and 1992, Cisco grew an average rate of 200% per year
with little or no advertising. On August 28, 1990, the management team
fired Lerner; upon hearing the news, Bosack resigned to show his
support. The two immediately sold their founder shares in Cisco for an
estimated $170 million. Neither are in Cisco any more, but the legacy
continues to thrive.
Page/Sergey Brin:
Founders
Search Researchers
Brin and Page originally met in March 1995, during a spring orientation
of new computer science PhD candidates at Stanford. Page was in search
of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical
properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a
huge graph. He focused on the problem of finding out which web pages
link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such
backlinks to be valuable information about that page. In his research
project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Brin. A polymath
who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis
topic, Brin found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. They
developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to
build a superior search engine; the intial version of Google was made
available in August 1996 on the Stanford site. In 1998, Google got
incorporated; Page ran Google as co-president along with Brin until
2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt as Chairman and CEO. Both Page and
Brin now earn an annual compensation of one dollar but their names have
become etched in the history of human civilization.
Yang: Yahoo! Founder
Father of Portals
While studying Electrical Engineering at Stanford, Yang co-created in
April 1994 with David Filo a website consisting of a directory of other
websites called "Jerry and Dave's Guide to the World Wide Web". It was
renamed "Yahoo!" (an exclamation). As it became very popular, Yang and
Filo realized the business potential and co-founded Yahoo! Inc. in
April 1995. They took a leave of absence and postponed their doctoral
programs indefinitely. The concept of Internet portal was born, though
Yahoo has later been upstaged by Google on almost all fronts.
Ironically, while Google has adopted a tough stance against Chinese
authoritarianism, Yang, despite his Taiwanese origin, has been
criticized for his role in the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao who
used a Yahoo address to notify a pro-democracy website that the Chinese
government ordered the Chinese media not to cover the fifteenth
anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Yahoo! provided the
Chinese security agencies with the IP addresses of the senders, the
recipients and the time of the message. Tao was subsequently convicted
for "divulging state secrets abroad." Yang was heavily criticized and
Reporters Without Borders alled Yahoo! "a Chinese police
informant".
Wales/Larry Sanger: Wikipedia founders
The Encyclopedia Makers
An expert-written online encyclopedia project Nupedia was launched in
the late 90s (with Larry Sanger as full-time editor-in-chief) by Bomis,
a web-advertising-selling firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and
Michael Davis. With the writing on content for Nupedia extremely slow
(only 12 articles in the first year), Sanger thought of using wiki as a
platform after he was explained the concept by a computer programmer
Ben Kovitz. Wales set one wiki up and put it online on January 10, 2001
and Wikipedia got conceived as a feeder project for Nupedia. There was
considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers
to the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website. Sanger
suggested giving the new project its own name, Wikipedia, and it was
soon launched on its own domainon 15 January 2001. The bandwidth and
servers (located in San Diego) used for these projects were donated by
Bomis. Wales made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text
"Hello, World!”. The oldest article still preserved (there are 14 mn
articles now with 3.2mn in English) is UuU, created on 16 January 2001,
at 21:08 UTC.
Caterina Fake/Stewart Butterfield:
founders
Visual Pioneers of Web 2.0
Trust a most photogenic husband-wife duo (though now divorced) to
launch the popular photo-sharing service FlickR and its parent company
Ludicorp in Vancouver in February 2004. The service emerged out of
tools originally created for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based
massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). Flickr proved a more feasible
project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved. the service is
widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and
social media. No wonder, therefore that FlickR is considered to have
ushered in the so-called Web 2.0 features such as social networking,
community open APIs, tagging, and algorithms that surfaced the best, or
more interesting content. In March 2005, Yahoo acquired FlickR and in
2006, the services were updated from 'beta' to 'gamma'--intended to be
tongue-in-cheek to indicate that the service is always being tested by
its users, and is in a state of perpetual improvement. While both Fake
and Butterfield left Yahoo in 2008, in May 2009, White House official
photographer Pete Souza began using Flickr as a conduit for releasing
White House photos.
Chad Hurley/Steve Chen/Jawed Karim:
founders
Video Made Them Kings
From Gandhi parodies to MMS of DPS peccadilloes to being official IPL
partner-YouTube has courted controversies not just in India but across
the globe. Its origin was however much less controversial-the PayPal
logo designer Hurley along with two other PayPal engineers, Chen (of
Taiwanese origin) and Karim (son of a Bangladeshi immigrant who grew up
in erstwhile West Germany), founded YouTube in January 2005 supposedly
to share videos from a dinner party with friends in San Francisco.
Sending the clips around by e-mail was a bust as the e-mails kept
getting rejected because they were so big. Posting the videos online
was a headache, too. So they got to work to design something simpler.
What obviously helped was the bonus Hurley had reveived when eBay had
bought PayPal for $1.54bn in 2002. YouTube soon became one of the most
popular sites and it was sold off to Google in 2006 for $1.65bn turning
the three overnight into multi-millionaires. While Chen is still the
CTO of YouTube, Hurley is now busy in trying to invest in one of F1
teams.
Benioff: Salesforce.com founder
Software's Dotcommer
Many believe Benioff should go down in history - or at least the
history of the software industry - for his nearly single-handed
invention of on-demand computing. After all, he launched not just
another Internet site/service, but brought software to the Net itself
when he launched Salesforce.com from a rented San Francisco apartment
in 1999 with the defined mission as The End of Software. With it, he
changed the software market's paradigm: “No Software” wasn't just a
marketing slogan - it was a mantra. Today ten years on, Salesforce.com
is a billion-dollar company and the software industry has been
irreversibly changed. Benioff should occupy the same pedestal as Bill
Gates or Larry Ellison-ironic considering he was with Oracle for 13
years and was its youngest VP ever; and more than once he has publicly
announced “Part of our mission is to end Microsoft”. He has long
evangelized Software-as-a-service (SaaS), coined Platform-as-a-service,
pioneered the 'cloud' revolution and now with Chatter plans to
coporatize social networking.
Lars Perkins:
founder
His Passion is Photography
Strictly not a dotcommer, but the efficacy of Perkins' digital photo
organizer tool made it most lucrative on the Net, courtesy Google. As
an executive at Pasadena-based business incubator Idealab, his mission
was to create companies. A camera enthusiast, he figured digital
photography was a lot of fun but way too complicated. So he dreamed up
Picasa, a blend of Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for 'my house' and
'pic' for pictures, a software program that takes the pain out of
finding photos stored on a computer hard drive. He was the CEO of
Picasa when it was snapped up by Google in 2004. For two years, when he
was Director, Product Management at Google his weekly schedule involved
working one day at home, commuting by his personal airplane to Google
campus in Mountain View, California another day and the other three
days flying from Pasadena to Google offices in Santa Monica. Subsequent
to Google, he has served as interim CEO of yousaidit, a search engine
integrated with social media, when he was one of the biggest corporate
donors to Obama's presidential campaign.
Ray Tomlinson: e-mail founder
The Man Who Mailed Himself
Because it is used in every e-mail address and many tweets, you might
be forgiven for thinking that the remarkably common symbol @, which
English-speakers know as the “at sign,” but Italians call a “snail,”
and south Slavs know as a “monkey,” is a fairly recent invention. It
was a Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi who used the symbol @ in
a letter written 474 years ago on May 4, 1536. The symbol ended
up on typewriter keyboards after it evolved over the centuries into
commercial accounting shorthand for the phrase “at the price of” in
records of transactions written by English merchants. That's why the
symbol was sitting on a computer keyboard in 1971 when an engineer
named Ray Tomlinson decided to use it in the first e-mail address to
send the first e-mail. But what was the first e-mail? Tomlinson says he
has no idea. “I sent a number of test messages to myself from one
machine to the other. The test messages were entirely forgettable and I
have, therefore, forgotten them.” The first e-mail content may now be
lost, but e-mail (and @) still remains the most popular dotcom
application/symbol, straddling Web 1.0, 2.0 and may we say 3.0.
Reid Hoffman:
founder
Silicon Valley's Most Connected
When Hoffman graduated from Stanford, his plan was to become a
professor and public intellectual. But soon the illusion was over as he
realized that academics write books that 50 or 60 people read and 'I
wanted more impact'. The opportunity for making more impact came in
2003 when he launched LinkedIn-the social network now primarily used
for business connections and job searching. At that time he was still
the EVP of PayPal in charge of business and corporate development; and
PayPal had just got acquired by eBay in 2002. Reid was LinkedIn's
founding CEO for the first four years before moving to his role as
Chairman and President, Products in 2007 (now executive chairman). He
is often called the 'most connected man in all of Silicon Valley'; has
strong relations with most central players in Web 2.0; coined the term
'Second Generation Web Entrepreneurs'; is on the board of Mozilla,
Burger King, Vendio, Six Apart, Kiva.org, Tagged, Zynga and invested in
Facebook, Ironport, FlickR, Digg, Grockit, Ping.frm, Nanosolar,
Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate and Last.fm among others. Want to check
Hoffman's entire professional career? Just check his LinkedIn profile.
Philip Rosedale: Second Life founder
Second Life was his First Love
“I'm not building a game. I'm building a new continent.” It was with
this vision to demonstrate a viable model for a virtual economy or a
virtual society that Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab created Second Life
(Philip Linden in Second Life avatar), an Internet scale virtual world
in 2003. This was after he left RealNetworks and founded Linden Lab in
1999 after a street in Hayes Valley. During a 2001 meeting with
investors, Rosedale noticed that the participants were particularly
responsive to the collaborative, creative potential of Second Life. As
a result the initial objective-driven, gaming focus of Second Life was
shifted to a more user-created, community-driven experience. Second
Life's status as a computer game is frequently debated. Unlike a
traditional computer game, Second Life does not have a designated
objective, nor traditional game play mechanics or rules. Second Life
has an internal currency, the Linden Dollar that can be used to buy,
sell, rent or trade land or goods and services with other users. Some
companies even generate US dollar earnings from services provided in
Second Life. First Brazil and then South Korea even have their own
independently-run portals to Second Life, operated by intermediaries.
Jarkko Oikarinen: Chat founder
He Made People Chat
Finland and technology? What immediately comes to mind is either Nokia
or Linus Torvalds (the father of Linux). Not so much Jarkko. That's not
being fair though to the originator of the now 'ubiquitous' chat, which
along with e-mail, search and blog ranks as the most popular Web
application. But the man whose homepage boldly flaunts “If it is not
logic, it's magic. If it is not magic, it is female logic” is not
complaining; in fact he is rather unassuming about the phenomenon he
created. It was while working at Oulu University in August 1988, he
wrote the first Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server and client programs,
which he produced to replace the MUT (MultiUser Talk) program on the
Finnish BBS OuluBox. IRC was the first Internet chat network; it was
used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt throughout
a media blackout and also during the first Gulf War. Jarkko continued
with IRC development (he is there known as the WiZ) and later
co-authored the IRC protocol with Darren Reed. IRC client software is
today available for virtually every computer OS that supports TCP/IP;
it's the basis for human communication in the 21st century.
Jorn Barger/Peter Merholz/Evan
Williams:
founders
When Diaries Got Dotcommed
A prolific Usenet poster since 1989, Barger started his Robot Wisdom
site in February 1995, publishing essays and resources on James Joyce,
AI, history, Jadaism, Internet culture, hypertext design, and
technology trends (note the esoteric diversity). On December 17, 1997,
Barger began posting daily entries on his Robot Wisdom Weblog featuring
“links to articles about politics, culture, books and technology that
he found interesting” and “amounted to something of a day-to-day log of
his reading and intellectual pursuits”. He coined the term 'weblog' to
describe the process of 'logging the Web' as he surfed. The even
shorter form, 'blog,' was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke
the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog
Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Shortly thereafter, Williams at Pyra
Labs used 'blog' as both a noun and verb (“to blog,” meaning “to edit
one's weblog or to post to one's weblog”) and devised the term
'blogger' in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product. Since 2002,
blogs have gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in
breaking, shaping, and spinning news stories, including the financial
and political goals of US-Israeli relations and the Iraq War. The trio
of Barger, Merholz and Williams has 'blogged' their way to posterity.
David Bohnett/John Rezner:
founders
Creating Web Identities
The concept of free Web hosting was born in mid-1995 when Bohnett (a
prominent gay activist and VC who owns Baroda Ventures) and Rezner
founded Beverley Hills Internet (BHI) in Southern California. They
created their own Web directory, organized thematically in six
'neighborhoods' (Colosseum, Hollywood, RodeoDrive, SunsetStrip,
WallStreet and WestHollywood) and offered users (thereafter known as
“Homesteaders”) the ability to develop free home pages within those
neighborhoods. This neighborhood became part of the member's web
address along with a street address number to make the URL unique (for
example, “www.geocities.com/RodeoDrive/number”). BHI soon added
additional cities, including CapitolHill, Paris, SiliconValley and
Tokyo and in December '95 became known as GeoCities after having also
been called Geopages. Bohnett/Rezner made GeoCities go public on Nasdaq
in 1998 and in January 1999 at the peak of the dotcom bubble it got
acquired by Yahoo (at that time GeoCities was the third visited website
behind AOL and Yahoo). Though in 2009 Yahoo closed down GeoCities, it
provided the Web 1.0 generation the opportunity to create personal web
identities-before blogs came in to add the 'interactivity'.
McNealy/Vinod Khosla/Andy Bechtolshein/Bill Joy: Sun Microsystems
founders
The Sun Rose...and Set Too
On February 12, 1982 Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim and Scott McNealy,
all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of
Berkeley, a primary developer of BSD, joined soon after. The Sun name
was derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network. While
Sun's first Unix workstation was conceived by Bechtolsheim, the company
was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982. Though Sun
went public in 1986, it was during the dotcom bubble that Sun
experienced dramatic growth in revenue, profits, share price, and
expenses. Some part of this was due to genuine expansion of demand for
web-serving cycles, but another part was synthetic, fueled by VC-funded
startups building out large, expensive Sun-centric server presences in
the expectation of high traffic levels that never materialized. The
marketing pashas with glee coined the tagline We are the dot in dotcom.
The share price in that particular period increased to a level that
even McNealy or Joy was hard-pressed to defend. Both the dotcom (and
consequently) Sun bubble burst in 2001 and McNealy (other founders had
left by then) was left to pick up the pieces and chart a new position
for the company. Java and Unix workstation will always be Sun's
permanent legacy to technology, but the Oracle acquisition in 2008 (and
McNealy's resignation in 2010) could not help giving the feeling that
an era was over.
The 25 Who Shaped Dotcoms
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