TRANSCRIPT: UX Week 2010 – Jeffrey Veen
How the Web Works
Hello, everybody. I think I met Peter 13, 14 years ago. I was working at Wired magazine, and we were – I was working on the Web properties at Wired magazine. And we were doing our first-ever usability test for some new stuff that we were working on, and our first-ever user who came in to sit down there was Peter.
[Audience laughter]
And I remember, I was behind the glass watching him, and he basically told us he couldn’t make sense of anything that we were doing, and none of it – and I was like, “Who is this guy saying all this stuff?” I think for about two years afterwards, we never did any more usability testing, ’cause I was always like, “Ah, the users are way too obnoxious when they come in.”
[Audience laughter]
So that’s my story of meeting Peter.
Yeah, so I picked a small topic for the 30 minutes that we have today, but I think we could get through it pretty quickly. Yeah, so Peter and I and a bunch of other people cofounded Adaptive Path. Adaptive Path has done a lot of stuff in the almost – geez, almost ten years since we started it. But I think fundamentally at the core was always the Web, and moved into user research and business strategy and service design and all that kinda stuff, but at the core, we started – we did stuff on the Web. And I think almost every project today always has that at the core.
My career has gone in different directions, and I’m working on a bunch of new stuff that is all about this thing we call the Web and this platform that we’ve created. And I wanna tell you a few stories about a bunch of different things, all relating to, I think, a fundamental thesis, which is that if we can understand the way the Web works and we try to work in the same way, we’re gonna be a lot more successful.
And so the first story I wanna tell you about, actually, is about beer. Are there any fans of beer in the audience here? Hey, look. Turns out. I am a big fan of beer. In fact, I travel a lot for work, and one of the things I do when I go to a new city is to figure out, like, what are they making here, ’cause there’s been this sort of renaissance of craft microbrew. And it’s a good way to sorta get to know an area, to see the kind of beer that they’re making and what’s popular.
So for those of you out of town coming here to my city, San Francisco, if you were to go to a place that specializes in beer – like, for example, Magnolia’s in the Haight, or also in the Haight, the Toronado – you will find that people that are really into beer will go to places that have beer on hand pump, coming straight outta the cask, served at room temperature, almost flat.
It is a very, very traditional way of making beer. Looks something like this, right? From hundreds of years ago, how they sort of made beer that way, because there was no refrigeration, which is kinda obvious, right? There was no electricity. Refrigeration, all that kinda stuff came much later. But it sort of informed how they made beer and how they sorta kept it and preserved it and how it tasted then, and we can sorta get a sense of that.
But that idea that things couldn’t be cold. Before, oh, about 200 years ago, really, there was no way to make anything cold. And it fascinates me because there’s a story about ice that really sort of resonates around this idea of technological progress.
So 200 years ago, you couldn’t get a glass of cold lemonade on a hot summer day like today. The only people who really had ice were the very wealthy, who had ponds on their land that would freeze over in the winter, and then they’d hire a bunch of workers to go out and saw the ice off of the pond, dig big holes, put all the ice in there, and insulate it with hay and stuff, and then see how long they could make it last over the summer so they could have fancy parties and drop ice cubes into people’s glasses. That was literally the only way in the summertime, like, in New England, that you could have a cold drink.
That, it turned out, was a business opportunity for a guy named Frederic Tudor. Frederic Tudor said, “You know, this is awesome that people really wanna have cold drinks or preserve their food or things like that. Let’s see if we can apply some technology and maybe think about the business model here in a way that we could get this out to more people than just the wealthy landowners.”
So he innovated in a few ways. He made a sort of ice plow that he could hook up to horses that did the work of ten men. But his real innovation was shipping, right? He realized that he could effectively build these ships that were so well insulated he could get the ice from New England down to places where it was hot all the time.
And so he began to ship ice down to places like the Bahamas, Cuba. Even out to London. He was able to sort of work out the timetable to get ice over there. There’s records of Queen Victoria buying ice from Frederic Tudor to serve at the palace. He even for a while shipped ice all the way to Calcutta. And there wasn’t much left when it got there, but there was enough to actually turn a profit and to do that.
Some of this ice he harvested right off of Walden Pond. And this comes from the book of the same name here, writing, “The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston, New Orleans, Madras and Bombay and Calcutta drink at my well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of Ganges.” And I think here that he was really using some poetic language to talk about peeing in the river, but regardless, it was a thing, right? It was actually – turned out to be a pretty big part of the New England economy, was this shipping and storage of ice harvested from ponds.
There’s lots of historical evidence, and Tudor became wealthy, became the sort of ice king of New England. But, as you can imagine, technology marches on, right? So his shipping and his storage device was only innovative for so long.
Later in the 19th century, around the 1850s or so, there was a guy named Dr. John Gorrie. He was an epidemiologist who studied communicable diseases in the tropics and did a lot of work in Florida trying to figure out how these diseases were different from diseases elsewhere. And his hypothesis was around the heat and humidity made them more severe and made them propagate faster, these tropical diseases.
And so he started to work on a technology for getting his hospital wards to cool down, and invented the first mechanical refrigeration, or at least was awarded one of the first patents. Many people were working on this at the time. But it quickly took off, right? The result being that it was able to be commercialized in cities, and icehouses kinda cropped up everywhere, meaning they could have these big, giant refrigeration units that spit out blocks of ice. And they could store them here, and they could make them year round, and they would start delivery service. And people could have ice in their homes and drove the price down to about a penny a pound, and included the development of the icebox, where people could keep food and keep ice so that they could have regular deliveries. And this was very successful. This was sorta the next generation of how refrigeration was working.
But as you can imagine, technology – just like today, just like all the little devices you’ve got in your pocket, and the laptops in front of you – every iteration of this technology meant that the price came down and that the devices got smaller, to the point where you could actually take one of those big machines and put it in your house. And now we have sort of the democratization of refrigeration, where anybody can make ice now, and it doesn’t require a distribution network or big warehouses or anything like that.
Here’s something from the 1920s in the GE catalog, talking about the old-fashioned kitchen full of work, the hundreds of lost hours, the result of lost youth and beauty, and then you could imagine, boom, the new iKitchen. Look at this. Here we go, the modern GE kitchen, which will easily pay for itself over time. So the marketing that we see today in technology, no different from the marketing in the past.
But this was insanely successful, right? It turned GE into one of the biggest companies in the world, manufacturing all sorts of appliances, but really starting with refrigeration.
So the reason this is interesting to me is because, if you look at the harvesting of ice and you look at the warehouse-level manufacturer of ice and then you look at the sort of distributing home appliances to make ice so that anybody can make ice, not one company made the transition. None of the shippers became warehouse companies; none of the warehouse companies became appliance companies. Although they were providing the same service for their audiences, nobody was able to make that transition.
Now, let me tell you a second story about some companies that were. Not far from here, on the South Fork of the American River, a man named James Marshall knelt down at that spot and discovered, in 1848, gold. He didn’t tell very many people, but they didn’t tell very many people, and eventually sort of the Gold Rush started, and everybody came here to San Francisco to get up into the hills to go get this gold. It was crazy what happened to the city of San Francisco. It doubled something like every six weeks for a number of years.
But to get here, it was difficult, right? Here’s a bill saying there’s a steamship called the Nicaragua, and it takes something like – I don’t know where – 35 days, right? You had to go all the way under to get here from the East Coast to California, or try the treacherous journey across. And for some reason, they’re billing that 200 jackasses are gonna come with you on the ship. I don’t know why –
[Audience laughter]
I don’t know why that’s a good idea, some kinda asset here or something.
So the Gold Rush actually worked a lot like how the venture-capital community here in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley works in that rich people in New York, where all the center of wealth was, would sign up people to go to California and fund them in exchange for getting a percentage back, right?
And so getting the people there was fine, but getting the money back was just way more important to these capitalists, right? They had to go all the way under, and it was a treacherous trip, and there were pirates and shipwrecks and all that kinda stuff. It was bad for their returns on their investment.
And so they started looking for ways across to do it as quickly as possible. That sort of resulted in what we ended up calling the Pony Express. There were a couple companies that did this. One was American Express; they started this way. The other was a company called Wells Fargo, which is a bank that’s based here in California.
They actually kinda forged the route and cut the roads through the mountains and that kinda stuff to make this possible, turning themselves into shipping companies, but really, in effect turning themselves into kind of these first cross-country banks because they would have the money on both sides. Now, of course, again, technology moving, once you have the roads all the way through, started stringing wires across that to bring the first telegraph service and creating what we often refer to as this Victorian Internet the first time we sort of strung up the world, so we could communicate with one another.
What’s really interesting about this is that Wells Fargo saw that coming. They were like, “We’re shipping gold with a guy sitting on top of a stagecoach with a gun, and we don’t have to do that once the wires are connected. Once the wires are connected, we can keep all the gold here in San Francisco and just tell them in New York. We can send some information to New York saying, ‘This is your money now,’ and they can have that money.” And they turned the wealth into information. We’re able to do this in absolutely no time, whereas before it still took weeks.
The amount of time that it took Wells Fargo to shift from stagecoaches with gold bars in them to the telegraph wires, once the first telegraph was sent from San Francisco to New York, was two days. They were like, “That’s it. This is our new business. We’re in it. We’re done.” And they stopped the horses.
Keeping all the gold in San Francisco may not have been the best idea. That’s the same building in 1906. They got the gold out, so that was fine. But Wells Fargo persisted and even made it through the financial crisis pretty well intact – in fact, acquired a few companies.
So how did they make it, and how did American Express make it, and how did the ice companies not, right? You see this happening all the time. It’s a deep and profound understanding of the business that you’re in and matching the user needs here, right? Matching the user needs regardless of how you are matching them now and how technological disruption and innovation changes that, and being able to respond to that all the time.
So loads of examples of that happening today on the Web. Let’s just look at a couple, right? There was a connection of technology that happened back in the ’90s, where computers started shipping with CD-ROMs. Broadband happened, especially on college campuses. New compression technologies came out. You put those three things together, and you have MP3s and Napster, right? And that fundamentally changed who was winning in the electronics game, as well as a lot of our notions of what intellectual property really is. Five years later, bandwidth increased five times. Flash – Adobe started putting video codecs into the Flash Player, and the result is the 24-hour Peter Merholz channel. Look at that.
[Audience laughter]
But fundamentally different models start emerging when that happens.
I’ve been working on this now for about two years with the company, Typekit, that we founded, based on concepts – 100 years of typographic history that fundamentally changed when the Web started and literally had no control over fonts.
Over the course of the 15 years that we’ve been doing Web design, we got control of a few fonts, because we kind of were able to assume that our audience had that. But the W3C had been working on technologies or specifications for how you could link to a font and send that font with the page and let the user see it, right? Something as simple as that.
There was a lot of talk about it about two years ago, saying, “All right, we should really do this now.” And then there was browser implementations. Opera started first, but then it was built into Safari, it was built into Firefox, it was built into Chrome, and surprisingly, it even works in Internet Explorer.
[Audience laughter]
In a traditional sort of Microsoft way in which they use a completely proprietary font format, but it still works, so that’s good.
And the results now – we’ve seen all this amazing new creativity. Like, this is just text, right? Like with CSS gradients put on it. That’s like an h1 that you can select and translate, it’s searchable, and all that kinda stuff. It’s fantastic. We’ve seen blogs start expressing themselves in much more stripped-down designs based on the beauty of the typography, and even large brands are now taking some of the assets that they’ve had for years, finally able to use them online.
But of course, this is disruptive, right? Because it’s putting the assets of the people who make these things right on the Web, right? The font developers. So, many of the foundries opposed it at first. They were worried. And it’s a little bit different, actually, than the recording industry, where an MP3 is a representation of a bunch of work. In the font world, a font is literally the entire source code. Every bit that they have put into creating that font is distributed over the Web.
So that was the sort of environment in which we were working when we created Typekit to work with foundries and to work with Web designers and to hook ‘em all together and to find a way through so that it was more like gold and less like ice, right? So if we’d take a step back and look at that, we can see, right? Whereas ice was at first thought it was about shipping and then about warehouses and finally about appliances, the reality was it was about people’s health. It was about their quality of life, and being able to provide that for people was the thing that was actually, in the end, the most successful. Just like gold was not about shipping bars of gold around, but in fact it was about communication, turning wealth into data, being able to speed up the financial markets that way.
And media, right? Like, all the MP3s and video and all the stuff that’s flying around the Web now is not about the disks and the way in which it was distributed in the past, but it’s really now about attention, right? It’s about the fact that, if something is popular, you might not be able to sell that thing, but you’ll have people’s attention while they’re engaging with it, and you can do something with that that might actually result in some money. Shifting all of these rules.
So I wanna look now at how that could really apply to what we do on the Web today, and I wanna look at one principle in particular that I’ve seen sort of emerge from the beginning of the Web, but really taking steam lately. We’ll talk about a couple others as well if we have some time.
But my thesis, like I said at the beginning, is I believe that the qualities that contribute to the success of the Web are also the qualities that will make us successful too, if we can embody them, if we can profoundly understand them and use them in our work all the time.
I call this being native to the Web, right? That means that we fundamentally understand the Web, deep down, internally get it, so that when we are advocating for doing the right thing in our organizations or with our clients, we are arguing from a position of “I know what’s right for the Web; it will be right for our users; it’s what’s right for our organization.”
So let me show you a little bit about how the Web has been created. There’s a couple of standards bodies. One is called the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force. Another is called – you’re probably familiar with the W3C. The IETF, real low-level stuff, like SMTP for e-mail and Ethernet, right? That’s where those standards come from. But the W3C – HTML, CSS, that kinda stuff. And also, I wonder why standards bodies have logos that are so pointy all the time, and I think any designers here wanna do a pro bono project, it would be much appreciated to fix some of that.
But the way they get this work done is fascinating. I did a bunch of it in the ’90s. I was on the HTML4 and CSS2 working groups as part of what I did for Wired magazine. And this is what it looks like. This is how the Web is made, right here. You go sit in some dreary conference room in a hotel somewhere, and one guy stands in the front and kinda moderates, and then people stand up and disagree with each other.
And it is – well, it’s awful, to be perfectly honest. It’s the most boring thing in the world. Incredibly important, and in retrospect, I’m so glad I got experience, but just the mind-numbing minutiae of what happens here is crazy.
Everybody in this room, by default, disagrees with one another, because they’re competitors, right? Microsoft and Netscape and HP and Apple, and they’re all sitting in this room, representatives from them are sitting here. But they all know that they want the same thing, right?
So in the case of CSS, we all sort of knew that there should be some language to help describe the style of a page, and it should be separate from that page. And that was gonna be kinda how the Web was gonna evolve, right? And this is 1996 or something like that. The Web will evolve that way.
So the guy from Netscape stands up and said, “We’ve thought about this. Our latest browser just shipped, and it’s got a thing in it called JavaScript, and it’s really taking off. People like JavaScript. They’re using it. It’s a procedural way of controlling kinda how a Web page behaves. So we think we should do the same for style, and so our proposal is JavaScript-based style sheets.” And that’s what they proposed to the working group at the W3C.
And half of the room was like, “Well, I write code, make code, make stuff. It’s great. It’s just gonna look like this, right? So if color red, make it bold, and stuff like that, perfect. And if it doesn’t work, you’ll get an error and you can debug, and that’s how you’ll do design.” Other half of the room where I was sitting were like, “Wait a minute. No, this is not how we do design, right? And this is gonna require a set of skills that’s not embodied in a lot of designers. Maybe there’s a simpler, more declarative way that we can do that.” And the argument starts happening, back and forth, back and forth. You don’t get anywhere with it, really, except for everybody kinda understanding both sides of the problem.
Later that night, as we do things like this, you go out for dinner with everybody and then end up in the pub. And I remember looking over at a booth and seeing the guy from Microsoft and the guy from Netscape with these giant early laptop computers, and they’re doing stuff and drinking beer and typing. And I’m like, “Wow, what are those guys doing? It’s, like, midnight.”
The next morning we get back in that dreadful room, and the two guys stand up from Microsoft and Netscape, and they say, “We both have builds of our browsers now. We’d like to distribute them all. We’ve come to sort of this middle ground. It’s kind of declarative, and there’s a language, a syntax, and everybody try it.”
And we all get the software and try it out, and it was tangible. You could see, like, “I can write some stuff. I don’t have to just think and take an ideological position. I can see which works better, what works better.” And that really, really is how all of this happens in the W3C, right? There is some consensus that needs to happen, and then you can get a green, and things like the standard can come out, like it did years later.
That’s a principle for how the Web works, how the Web was built. It’s called rough consensus and running code. Those are the two things you need. Nobody’s gonna agree, but we did all have consensus that we needed style. The way in which consensus turned into agreement was by getting essentially prototypes into people’s hands, the running code. You could use it, and once you could use it, it was tangible. You could make stuff.
I’ll give you another quick early history of the Web. This comes from Mark Pilgrim, who wrote Dive Into Python, Dive Into HTML5. He’s at Google now. Fantastic writer. He did some archaeology, some digital archaeology of the W3C mailing list – or actually, the Web mailing list from the early 1990s.
This is from February 25 of 1993. Some college kid in Illinois proposing something for a browser that he’s working on that’s gonna be called Mosaic. His name is Marc Andreessen; maybe you’ve heard of him. He said, “I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag called ‘image.’ The required argument is ‘source=URL.’”
And we didn’t have images at the time on the Web. Literally. You could link to one; it would open in some viewer, but you couldn’t put an image on a Web page. And he’s proposing that we should do this. This college kid: “If you have a better idea than what I’m presenting now, please let me know.” He’s like 19, right?
So then Tony Johnson, who’s over at Stanford, writes back and says, “Oh, I’ve been thinking about this too. My browser’s called Midas, and I’ve got ‘icon’ with an href.” And then Tim Berners-Lee, ’cause this is the Web mailing list, and Tim Berners-Lee isn’t a famous guy yet in 1993. But he’s on that list, and he says, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been thinking about images as well, but I hadn’t wanted a special tag,” and he makes some other proposal. So clearly, there’s consensus, right? It’s rough consensus. We wanna do images somehow, but nobody can agree how.
So then, about six weeks later, Mark Andreessen posts back to the list and says, “I’m getting close to releasing the first version of the Mosaic, which is gonna support inline images. So we’re probably gonna go with what I proposed.”
[Audience laughter]
So the sorta debate kinda went on for what would be the best thing to do, and eventually he wins, right? Because he ships some code, and it gets into people’s hands, and they’re like, “Oh, all right, I see how this works.” It could be better. You could abstract it, make it “object,” and anything could be inline. But we went with this because it was simple and he shipped it first and literally made history. A few weeks later, he shipped the Mosaic browser and literally made history. There’s a plaque that says “The first Web browser was made here.”
[Audience laughter]
So rough consensus, running code, a fundamental principle for how the Web works, but also a great way for us to do product development.
So let me give you a very brief – like, the first few weeks when we were working on Typekit earlier last year, where we were gonna sort of embody this principle. We had this idea that it could work, right? You could actually make a service that did fonts on the Web and get some of the foundries to go together.
And so literally, the first few days we, like, talked about it in very big picture, and we sketched up a bunch of ideas. These are pages from Jason Santa Maria, our creative director, his notebook. This is not my work. I could never do such a thing.
But literally by the end of the first week, we had visualized kinda what it could look like, right? All right, so we could have – this is how we would explain it to people. This is maybe how it would start to function, and these were some of my chicken scratches. But this would – maybe this would be how it worked. All right, let’s get it into Photoshop. So we, too, we sorta make it into Photoshop.
And immediately as we have these, we start sending them around, and I get on the phone with Web designers that I know all over the place, like “Hey, here. If you saw this, what would you think? If you saw this, how would you use it?” We even mocked up in Photoshop our business model: “How about this?” And shared that with everybody.
We had not written any code yet. We just had, like, this sense that, you know what, if we could make this tangible, there was lots and lots of consensus in the world that fonts were gonna work on the Web. We wanted to get there first, so we went really fast and just made some prototypes, showed it to people, and then did something we’d never done before, which was we just wrote a blog post about it and kinda put it out on Twitter and said, “Here’s everything we’re gonna do.” Still hadn’t written any code yet, but wanted to see, is this a good idea? And it turns out it was, right? We were a trending topic on Twitter that day, which kinda blew our minds that Web fonts would be that cool, but also Susan Boyle and “three words after sex” are also trending topics, so…
[Audience laughter]
Like, get a hold of the ego, right?
But what happened is we got a tremendous amount of feedback, half of it saying “best idea in the world,” the other half “doomed to fail.” So that made me feel good as well, because if it was all in the middle, it wouldn’t have been as exciting at all.
But basically, everybody who thought we were gonna fail gave us a list of things that we would have to do, so we had our marching orders, and that was great. And Twitter is an amazing place for this. Like, I literally spend an hour every morning reading all the tweets that mention Typekit, so if you want my attention, that’s a great way to do it. But I do every day, because it is real-time, honest-to-goodness customer feedback, as blatant as possible, either good or bad, because you only have 140 characters to do it.
So we went fast, and we iterated it as fast as we could and literally launched with the minimal viable product that we could, as the simplest thing that we could, and then continued to iterate after that.
I love this quote: “If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your product, you’ve waited too long.” That’s from Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman is the CEO of – or he was the CEO of LinkedIn. And it’s true, right? Now, I know this really quick iteration – it’s easy for you to say, “Oh, yeah, great, Mr. Startup, but I work at this big company. We have all this process and all that kinda stuff.”
But look at these other giant Internet brands when they got started. Like, Google literally was apologizing, right? Like, “We have 25 million pages, but soon we’re gonna be much bigger,” right?
You saw a version of – this is Facebook four, five years ago. We saw a version of this earlier today, but literally only worked in Harvard, and then a couple more colleges before they ran out, so really the minimum viable thing. This is the homepage of Amazon when they launched.
[Audience laughter]
What’s missing here? Books. I know.
[Audience laughter]
Not many books.
I love this little joke. This is the Apple Lisa homepage, at Apple back in 1989 – or ’83. I found this on Flickr. I thought it was funny. Not really their first homepage, but it’s hilarious, like “Look, preorder the iPhone.” That’s pretty cool, this thing.
[Audience laughter]
But look at this quote here. I’m running a little outta time, so I’m going a little fast here, but the velocity and responsiveness of your team to user feedback will set the tone for your software. Responsiveness, velocity, right? More than any single release ever could, and that’s what you have to get good at, says Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror.
I mean, Twitter is fantastic at this, right? They have looked for patterns in what their users are doing, and built features that literally lay right on top of them. Like, here’s the tweet where the hashtag was first introduced by Chris Messina. They turned that into a feature. “At” replies. Exactly, right? People are using this behavior. We’re gonna go on top of that. Retweets, the same thing.
The reality is – I believe this fundamentally – the speed of iteration beats the quality of iteration. The faster that we can go and do product development with tangible code that we can show to our users, the more successful we’re going to be, because we can learn so much faster, right? And that’s that idea of rough consensus, right? We generally have an idea. We’ve done some user research. We know what the market wants. Right? We’re gonna put that into this sort of process of running code as quickly as possible.
There are tons and tons of other principles I wish we had more time to talk about. I could talk about ‘em all day. But look at this, for example, which is an RFC from the early days of the Internet that embodies a fantastic principle for the Web, in that we should be liberal in what we accept and conservative in what we send. It’s how they built the fundamental protocols of the Web. It’s the robustness principle from Jon Postel, right? It’s an amazing principle. It’s fundamental to how the Web works.
How about small pieces loosely joined, right? That’s how Unix works. That’s how the Web works. That’s why we have APIs, right?
How about this? Information wants to be free. Another amazing principle that came from Stewart Brand, but predates him, even. It goes on and on.
All of this, right? All of these principles, if you dig in and read about any one of them and internalize them, make us better at what we do at building the Web. And I think the Web – I think this is pretty important, right? I said from the beginning, like, I’ve dedicated my career to the Web, and it’s not just like this is a new thing that we’re gonna do with our business now, and we’re gonna try to be a little more engaged with our customers. I think the Web is pretty fundamental to kinda human culture now. And I know that it can sound like hyperbole, but I really believe that we are kinda finding a new way of not replacing the relationships that we have between each other and the intimacy that we have, but amplifying it, right? And it is really kinda fundamentally changing a lot of human culture.
The Web is the place where our most precious memories and experiences are recorded now. We don’t have physical representations of stuff anymore; we put it on the Web, right? And it’s all there, and we trust that it’ll always be there. We are writing human history collaboratively, kinda for the first time ever, right? And we’re doing it on the Web, right? And the Web is about to spill out, right? Spill out of our browsers and our phones and stuff, and into the real world, right? And the Web is gonna be – this data is gonna be all around us and overlaying us everywhere.
So I believe the Web is a pretty fundamentally different thing. And I think, actually, that it’s so fundamentally different that the people who make the Web, the people like all of us at a conference like this, have a responsibility to sort of protect the Web from the kinds of bad decisions and bad ideas that bombard it every day, the threats to the Web. I mean, Wired magazine just this month is proclaiming the Web to be dead, right? I think Chris Anderson couldn’t be farther off this time. It’s ridiculous.
But it’s a meme, right? And they’re replacing it with not an open and free and accessible Web, but a closed Web. Walled gardens, places where the Web can be safe and we can warn people to be careful of what’s out there. Stay inside, where it’s safe here.
Or handing people a business model, right? As long as you use the right coding language and submit to essentially a censorship process, we’ll give you a business model. And you don’t have to worry about the Web anymore; this is the way we’ll deliver everything. Right?
There’s also – I mean, it’s a fundamental shift in how power and wealth is being distributed in the world, and there’s people that want it to be like it was in the 20th century, and say, “No, these changes, I’m not gonna let ‘em happen, and I think I’m still powerful enough to get it done.” And that’s what Rupert wants to do, and a lot of people like him wanna do that. And then there’s just other companies that, frankly, don’t give a shit that if the memories, the stuff, those connections that are so valuable to us, if they don’t meet the bottom line and we can’t afford the servers anymore, shut it all off. What could matter?
So I think every time you make a decision, that you’re faced with some decision in your organization where you’re thinking “Which way do we go? Do we follow one of these paths that doesn’t seem to resonate with how the Web works, or do we do it the right way? Do we serve our users in a way that’s fundamental, that is native to the Web?” Whether it is in a business development negotiations, whether it’s choosing to use Web standards or some other technology, whether it’s doing user research or simply going the way we always have, it’s our responsibility to do this.
I’ve dedicated my career to the Web, and I love the Web, and I really hope you guys do too, ’cause we have so much of it left to build.
Thank you very much.
[End of Audio]
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