By Marietta A. Szubski
Lots of people talk about the evolution of the Web, but it’s even more interesting to open up the lens to look at evolution AND the Web. The tech bubble may have burst, but the Web is just beginning according to Tom Corddry, former General Manager of Microsoft’s Multimedia Publishing group, author, and CEO of SmartChannels. Corddry likens the current state of the Internet to that of the Burgess Shale – a fossil site that holds the result of the Cambrian Explosion, an evolutionary “Big Bang” of complex life forms. In a recent interview, Corddry discussed some of the trends he sees emerging.
The Burgess Shale Period
For nearly 2 billion years, only simple, single-cell life forms existed on earth. Then the Cambrian Explosion occurred, and within the span of 10-20 million years, a geologic blink-of-an-eye, an astonishing array of complex animal forms appeared on the scene. “It was like evolution decided to try everything – 6 legs, 4 legs, 2 claws, things that live in the water, things that walk on land. It was like the Archie McPhee of animals,” said Corddry, who is also well-versed in biology.
In terms of the Web, this is where we are now, according to Corddry. We are experiencing and creating an explosion of complex entities that never existed until now. Web users and contributors are being challenged with an expanding collection of new uses, tool capabilities, form factors, bandwidth potential, site designs, database applications, rules, emerging standards and more. Some of these models will prove to be too simple and will lead to a dead end, some will disintegrate into chaos, but there is a sweet spot, an equilibrium where things come together.
“A lot happens between total order and total chaos,” said Corddry. “Look at the rainforest. Despite its complexity it has an order.” Corddry compared the interconnectedness inherent in the Web to the Complexity Theory posed by Stuart A. Kauffman in his book “At Home in the Universe.” Kauffman is the thinker who introduced the concept that a butterfly flapping its wings in China could initiate a series of events that resulted in a hurricane in the Atlantic.
Venture Capital and Distortion
The massive infusion of venture capital into the Web during the 1990s enabled an enormous amount of innovation to occur, but it also led to a distortion in the Web’s evolutionary process, Corddry said. The mass speculation of the dot-com bubble led to the emergence of two parallel markets. The primary, simple market was operating on the traditional basis of companies succeeding when their products sold well in the market. The secondary market was based on the concept that people were betting on ideas – what people think people will want.
“Venture capital narrowed it down to a few people making really big bets,” Corddry said. “And, they bet on a lot of bad stuff.” This had the effect of prematurely squeezing a lot good ideas out of the market. In some cases, a potentially good idea was deafened by the noise from the capital market.
The rush to grab market share became an “arms race” in which there was only one survivor, which wasn’t necessarily the best one for consumers. For many of those companies, this resulted in a “market blindness.” However, companies such as Microsoft and Cisco, which were started in leaner times and were built with little capital, have a better market sensibility.
The Pho Effect
The growing level of personalization on the Web is what Corddry describes as “The Pho Effect.” Like this Vietnamese specialty, “each user gets a unique soup or Web experience that comes together at the moment it is served,” Corddry said.
Pho works like this: You choose a soup off of a simple menu, and within just a few minutes the fresh, hot meal arrives. Some of it is prepared in the kitchen, some of it is done by the waiter, some of the raw ingredients are presented for you to add, and some are on the table. It all comes together quickly from many sources and is specific to your preferences.
Corddry points out that many popular web sites, like Amazon.com are increasingly serving up a highly personalized, “Pho-like” Web experience. Each page is unique to the user at that moment. The pages can come together from a variety of sources such as databases, ad servers, templates, user-provided information, even information and images pulled from other sites. “Another way to think of a Web page is that it does not exist until you ask for it,” Corddry said.
This effect has some interesting implications for site designers and architects. For example, what does “back” really mean in this environment? The pages are ephemeral. It also poses interesting questions around the issues of intellectual property and privacy. Who really owns the information on the page? And, like the Pho chef, the designer of the page will never see the page that the end user experiences. This means relinquishing a certain amount of control over the final product, said Corddry.
Artificial Life
“Under certain conditions, organization increases with no-one in charge. This is what is happening on the Web right now,” Corddry said. “There is no single command entity driving it.” According to Corddry, we have found one of those “sweet spots” of equilibrium where there is just enough, but not too much standardization. “You don’t want to innovate on everything,” said Corddry. That is one of the things that killed multimedia CDs – the uniqueness of every interface confused people.
Like the single celled entities that organized themselves into the complex organisms found in the Burgess Shale, the Web is part of a larger life form that we can’t even recognize.
“Emergence of intelligence in the Web will go unnoticed by us for a long time. It goes beyond what we are aware of,” Corddry said. “The Web is open and vast. There’s a lot of mystery there.” [24×7]
Corddry’s company, SmartChannels, is a Seattle-based software company that provides a collaborative content management and Web publishing service to small enterprises. Tom can be reached at [email protected]
Marietta A. Szubski is a Seattle-area freelance copywriter.
