Last week I wrote that sometimes an early stage startup simply doesn’t have what it takes to single-handedly create a new category. The first example I recall of watching that happen first-hand was at the birth of what we now know as the Internet.
Towards the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s (even before the Web was invented) more and more companies were looking for ways to leverage the global connectivity that the Internet provided. It was becoming apparent that some commercial form of the network would emerge. IBM and MCI were anxious to monetize the investment they’d made in building and operating the NSFnet backbone. Both companies thought the current model of telecommunications worked just fine. They wanted to build a commercial Internet modeled on the status quo with toll gates and usage-based billing.
At the same time entrepreneurs were developing a very different vision for a commercial Internet. UUNET and PSInet recognized that the world was changing. Packet switching was riding Moore’s Law to drive the cost of connectivity towards zero and new applications were emerging that would drive network utilization exponentially higher. Metering the Internet would limit both usage and innovation. Their vision for the commercial Internet was not just better, it was different. It was a new category, not just a new service in the old category.
But how could these early stage startups hope to challenge the status quo, change the thinking at government bureaucracies like the NSF, and take on corporate giants like IBM and MCI? By themselves, they didn’t stand a chance.
Click the link below to read my story of how they formed a coalition to challenge the status quo. I believe that the Internet would be very different today if those early stage startups hadn’t joined together to establish the Commercial Internet category. I am thankful that otherwise fierce rivals were willing to come together to establish the better and different vision that they shared.