Happy Birthday Baby: Remembering the Advent of the World Wide Web

They say the finer things in life improve with time, and thirty years ago on April 30, we witnessed the birth of something pretty incredible: the World Wide Web was gifted to the public domain, and its name was Internet.

Transformation has rolled over humanity in waves—first by harnessing the spark to build a fire, to creating rudimentary tools, and eventually restructuring the way we live and work with advent of agriculture. The Industrial Revolution in 1760 brought our first major innovation cycle—this zeitgeist moment ushered technological advancements that shifted even our most basic functions, marking an indelible point-of-no-return.

I have seen some of these moments in my own professional career: floppy disks, personal computers, mobile devices (even pre-smartphones ones), and now, the internet, cloud, and artificial intelligence.

Innovation cycles are accelerating with equal fervor to humanity’s curiosity, occurring faster than ever, functioning more like relay sprints than marathons, reducing time-to-launch from sixty years to thirty to... *— with AI, possibly down to minutes.

Today, anyone with broadband and wireless access largely takes the internet for granted. We expect our connections to be lightning-fast, we depend on getting the content we need at the click of a button, and we ourselves have become always-on. The internet changed the game for the tech industry and businesses of all sizes. ?

Easy access to information and vast improvements from hypertext-only origins catalyzed a dramatic new business model and a cadre of disruptors: the .dot com darlings of the mid to late-nineties who challenged big-box retailers' status quo, restructured operations, and forever changed buyer behavior.

In less than seven years, over 17 million businesses launched websites for their goods and services.

Telecommunication companies also bet big, making multi-billion-dollar investments, and in some cases imploded in doing so, like many of the nascent .dot coms funded by VCs intoxicated by the potential upside. Those miscalculations helped us gain the fiber backbone and business insights for enabling the maturity of the internet we enjoy today, and the infrastructure to support its growth ambitions. The internet has brought us some of the biggest and most respected brands, and inspired Microsoft to "turn on a dime" to respond to the opportunity.

Back in the early nineties, people like me existed in a business landscape where everything that led to this moment was limited only by our imaginations.

"Imagine being able to communicate at-will with 10 million people all over the world," NPR's Neal Conan once said. "Imagine having direct access to catalogs of hundreds of libraries as well as the most up-to-date news, business and weather reports. Imagine being able to get medical advice or gardening advice immediately from any number of experts.”

“This is not a dream," Conan went on to say, "it's the internet."

Just ten million people, huh? With two thirds of the world now online—that's around 5.3 billion people**—the internet has evolved into a cornerstone of the way people communicate, work, and businesses serve their constituents and customers.

The .dot com implosion momentarily tempered all the hype and fanfare in 2000, a sobering moment that wisely taught the internet how to crawl then walk before it would run.

If technology innovation is indeed a relay sprint, the next passing of the baton lands squarely in the palm of A.I., with an abundance of information begging to be sourced, organized, and relayed faster and with greater accuracy than ever thought possible.

Possibilities go hand-in-hand with responsibilities—A.I. should be designed to better serve humanity, automate the rote tasks of productivity workers and accelerate learning and the advent of new skills – safely. The next spark is the awakening of the untapped ingenuity of humanity.

There is a popular adage attributed to Harvard professor, George Santayana, "Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are destined to repeat them."

In the case of A.I. and Microsoft, there is no "turning on a dime" this time. There are people in the organization who have been in the A.I. space for decades, developing technology while at the same time contemplating its implications. More specifically, for the past seven years, Microsoft has been a thought leader and steward of governance through a continually-evolving responsible A.I. initiative.

There is no doubt that A.I. is the new inflection point, a burgeoning zeitgeist eager to take off running, but first, we must learn to safely crawl. Together, we can learn from the past to better prepare ourselves for the future, fully leveraging the advantages of these extraordinary advancements without tripping before the finish line.?

Sources:

*Long Waves: The History of Innovation Cycles - Visual Capitalist

**20 Incredible Online Business Statistics [2023] - Zippia