Whit AndrewsOK, campers, here’s my PostSecret: I blew off the Netscape keynote when they announced Constellation.
Thanks to flickr’s termie for the image.
Now you know. Well, you know what my secret is. I bet a lot of you — even most of you — are sitting there right now asking yourselves, “Why did I click that RSS feed thing?” Well, no, maybe not yet — but you don’t remember Constellation, either.
Hint: “Push.”
Another hint: “Microsoft introduced Active Desktop to combat it.”
Last hint: “It went in the midden with everything else related to push technology except that software update thing.”
The point is, I missed the part of the Comdex keynote when Netscape showed off Constellation. At the time, that was roughly equivalent to skipping the announcement of Wave at Google I/O. (Please, for the love of all that is not holy, per se, tell me you have tattooed that great Wave logo on your naked cheek by now, like all the other cool kids.) I found out about it on CNN, that night, in my room in Las Vegas’s elegant Four Queens hotel. (I liked staying in the Four Queens, because I could look out my window at point blank range upon the fabulous light show.) I was eating a room service cheeseburger, and I was absolutely stricken. Missing something like that — well, you know how (legitimately) exciting Wave is for developers and Web People Who Know? Well, Constellation was like that then for the business side of IT, for the people who had discovered that Microsoft could not be presumed to successfully dominate every aspect of technology, and that there were alternatives to discussing the shortcomings of HTTP 1.1 at dinner, and so forth.
These were rock star years. The Rolling Stones introduced Windows 95. Netscape was itself a celebrity. And the fact that I missed the Constellation launch, on the Big Stage in Vegas, about 10 years ago? Zero impact. Less than zero. I had a cheeseburger I can remember! That’s a mark in the “plus” column.
My frustration with Wave and Wave coverage in general stems from my grounding in those hype-driven years, just as did my frustration with the Bing blast. (There’s a truck. Like you would doubtless expect.) It’s not just hype. Stealth launches can create hype, too, but it’s more manageable, and even a lame literature major like myself can see where it’s going, and why.
The enormous Wave wave — at least in our teacup here in technology — seems practically designed to disappoint. The good news is that we are all saying it will be a long time before Wave matters. But we’re simultaneously being overwhelmed by superpositive messages from a world yearning desperately for unequivocally good news.
I credit Google: No rock stars; no trucks; just a video shown to the faithful with a clear technical message (to people like my colleague Ray Valdes) that backs its claim. Bing shouldn’t have banged the gong so loud.
But what I yearn for, as I said earlier, is a no-launch world. Twitter didn’t have a debutante party; nor did Facebook; nor did Myspace; nor, for that matter, did Google. It’s the products that don’t have to be sold or even rolled out that have the most impact.
Wave’s launch is proper; I suspect it is the yearning the world has for Great New Things (and I have said that a desire not to be bored is what will keep America and the rest of the world from economic despondency) that resulted in superhype.
Same advice goes for any major new venture just now, though: Co-exist with what’s there. Google is not going away, and nor is Microsoft, nor mainframes, nor databases. And launch soft: Prove yourself first; then compete.
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
6 responses so far ↓
1 Esteban Kolsky June 2, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Whit,
I cannot believe you missed the launch of Constellation. I was there, and I thought that we had just hit another mother lode for the internet age. It was magic… oh wait, that was the announcement of something else Microsoft was doing that year. I cannot recall,. they all ran pretty close to each other back then.
You make one good point but I take exception to one part of your post. You say that MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter had no launch. True, but they were not conceived as products for mass consumption. If I remember my history correctly, MyScape came about from several musicians who wanted to share their music legally and easily. Facebook was made for incoming students to know the old ones. Twitter was made — well, because it was cool to send SMS to several friends at the same time instead of one by one.
They all grew out of their original ideas driven by the people’s demand for such systems as they exist today. That was not the case for Constellation – or for Wave.
Wave, and Bing by extension, is about grown-up companies announcing their vision for the future. We have to have a party when someone announces how they are going to change the world — we always had and we always did.
I credit Google in their launch for coming up with a toolset for developers to create something more powerful out of the status quo. If you remember, they announced the other new “stuff” (wheel and contextual search) without much fanfare about a week or two earlier. This was an introduction to a new way to work for developers. Like you said, at least there was no truck.
Microsoft…. well, you have been around this teacup as long as I have. Microsoft always makes nice. When you try to figure out what the noise is about, they put the men behind the curtain, setup the mirrors and smoke machine, and get ready for the “release”.
You got something very right though. The launch is not the event, the eventual release of something useful is the event. Ask Netscape how the launch schedule is going… or should I say Oracle (ok, not yet – soon).
2 Rob Robinson June 2, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Great Post Whit – I agree with you – but the “Hype Launches” were so cool – but ultimately logic trumps emotion in business – at least in the long run.
3 Whit Andrews June 2, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Thanks for reading, guys. Esteban, you’re right — those Big Things I mentioned weren’t big when they started. Nor was Yahoo. Nor was Lycos. Nor was Alta Vista.
Hmmm.
4 OTOH - What Big Launches Do Well June 2, 2009 at 10:58 pm
[...] noted recently that Big Launches are No Man’s Friend. On the other hand, though, the next day I got a taste of why they still happen and developed a [...]
5 Wolfram Alpha so far, or, the Big Launch #fail risk June 3, 2009 at 10:54 am
[...] was a Large Launch. Like I said recently, big launches don’t confront me any more. But Wolfram Alpha did quite well, with broad media coverage. The risk is that when everybody (who [...]
6 Chrome OS: Why now? Mischief and Communication July 8, 2009 at 2:06 pm
[...] 1. Google is announcing Chrome OS now because it wants to stop developers from using good-enough technology it has developed and instead to wait for better technology. A blog post on the Google blog is far more effective than any Big Campaign to call people on their little Google phones, or whatever the cognoscenti use now. (iPhones? Like I would know.) (See also, No More Big Launches, Please.) [...]