9 ms·

I was the first corporate web master for AltaVista and joined in January 1996 to manage everything except for the actual search engine itself. It was my first

by pelle 6y ago

I was the first corporate web master for AltaVista and joined in January 1996 to manage everything except for the actual search engine itself. It was my first real job at a large company and taught me a lot about working in corporate America. I saw so many mistakes made within the year I worked there that were obvious even at the time for a lot of us that worked there, but at the same time there are many similarities to what happens with other very well funded projects trying to make sense of a new technology and way of doing businesses within a large very important company with a very different business model. I have seen virtually the exact same playbook happen in the enterprise blockchain space in multiple occasions over the last 5 years. It is sad in many ways to see what happened to DEC (probably more so than AltaVista). It was such an innovative company back in the 60s and 70s, but unlike IBM weren't able to reinvent themselves in first the new 80s world of PCs and then later internet. Classic case of innovators dilemma. AltaVista itself largely died, because in a misguided attempt to manage the innovators dilemma they just tried to rebrand everything network oriented they had as AltaVista. People only remember the search engine now and for good reason. But we had AltaVista firewalls, gigabit routers, network cards, mail server (both SMTP and X400 (!!!) and a bunch of other junk without a coherent strategy. Everything that had anything to do with networking got the AltaVista logo on it. The focus became on selling their existing junk using the now hip AltaVista brand, but the AltaVista search itself was not given priority. I learnt a lot from my experience there, grew to be extremely skeptical, learnt to love Dilbert and also learnt how cool the DEC Hardware and Digital Unix was compared to the Sun Sparc and Solaris stuff I had to work on afterwards.

Crashprofessor 6y ago
I was in Nassau working between FSG/PM and the ACA/CORBA team. Recall many trips to the WRL, they always had the coolest stuff; network tunnels and firefly. Back then who you hated said a great deal and I recall several other CEs playing the silver bullet game to perfection. I'm curious the relation to the corporate blockchain?
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  >> I'm curious the relation to the corporate blockchain? I think its the idea of companies seeing new tech and trying to leverage it somehow in their own businesses and failing - badly. Here's my own anecdotal evidence with blockchain: I work in a very large health care company. For about four months, there was a huge buzz around the company about how to leverage block chain in health care. The main idea was using block chain to manage patient accounts and PPE. We had all the execs bring in to do huge presentations. They brought in people from IBM to talk about Hyperledger and other block chain companies. They posted videos and articles about how this going to transform healthcare, we were all told this was going to be huge. They told people they were going to form a new team, hire developers and this was a going to be a huge focus in 2020. Six months later? You couldn't find a single resource on any of it on any of the internal company sites. All the presentations stopped, the execs stopped talking about block chain seemingly over night and it was like poof! the idea of block chain, or any mention of it or the "revolution" that supposed to follow? Completely disappeared into the abyss, never to be heard from again. I have no idea how much they sank into the notion that block chain could be used for health care, or how many people they hired or the contracts they signed with IBM, but I can only assume they lost a lot of money before they finally realized it wasn't going to work out.
  - ptx 6y ago
    Would blockchain have been useful for healthcare? As I understand it, the main reason to use blockchain is having multiple parties intact without any party being trusted, so if you do have some central trusted authority it's pointless. There's also the requirement that the network has enough participants that no single party can gain a majority of the network's compute power, which seems a very iffy assumption with private/permissioned blockchains. So I don't see how blockchain is useful in a healthcare context. Please correct me if I'm wrong and enlightenen me if I'm missing something.
    - howlgarnish 6y ago
      You're not missing anything, and this lovely flowchart from NIST shows just how rare actual use cases are: https://thefinanser.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/NIST-flowchart.png https://thefinanser.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/NIST-flow... However, the execs making decisions about hot buzzwords like "blockchain" or "AIOps" etc neither understand nor care.
sradman 6y ago
Anyone familiar with Inverted Text Indexes when AltaVista was at its peak appreciated DEC's business model and execution. Google's PageRank pulled the rug out from under standard Inverted Text Indexes and quickly obsoleted the competition. Re-ordering the entire index nightly with potentially multiple passes is non-trivial and requires throwing a lot of hardware at the problem. In my opinion, marketing wasn't the problem; the problem was fast-following a disruptive technology without understanding how it worked. Once details of PageRank were published it was too late.
- dumbfounder 6y ago
  Why was it too late? They were still number one when pagerank was published, all they needed to do was put more resources into it. Google’s algorithms weren’t magic. The biggest problem was lack of vision, and willingness to bet on that vision. Investors in Google were swinging for the fences, that mentality would never have been at home at DEC.
  - ericbarrett 6y ago
    Google’s algorithms were definitely “magic” by the standards of the time. Altavista never got much better than literal keyword search even when they introduced PageRank-style weighting. Google immediately had useful results from misspellings, questions, and related keywords, and only got better from there. Plus it was much faster; responses in 1-2 seconds versus 5-10 sometimes for AV. Maybe what you said is true, but they were deep in the hole as soon as Google launched.
    - alain94040 6y ago
      True, and Google is slowly being disrupted by the next generation of Internet search (looks like disruption happens every 20 years or so). The age where "search" is meant to return pages will eventually end. I know it's early, but you can think of GPT-3 as the next generation of search engines. You consume the entire "Internet knowledge", and you answer questions, by merging information from multiple sources. Not just returning one existing page. That's sort of what GPT-3 does, you just don't think of it as a search engine yet. Google felt "magic" in 2000. A search-oriented GPT-3 will feel "magic" soon.
Multicomp 6y ago
thanks for posting this. I love when HN brings together the principal actors and primary sources. OT: I wish we could use webmaster more often, even though thats a much murkier proposition in the days of product managers deploying the new site via CDeployment.
tus88 6y ago
> It is sad in many ways to see what happened to DEC (probably more so than AltaVista). It was such an innovative company back in the 60s and 70s, They should have merged with a PC make obviously. > but unlike IBM weren't able to reinvent themselves in first the new 80s world of PCs and then later internet. Ironically IBM did fail to reinvent itself despite inventing the PC and it's cake was stolen from it.
- sradman 6y ago
  > They should have merged with a PC make obviously. DEC was acquired by Compaq [1]: > In 1998, Compaq acquired Digital Equipment Corporation for a then-industry record of US$9 billion. The merger made Compaq, at the time, the world's second largest computer maker in the world in terms of revenue behind IBM. Maybe you were being sarcastic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq#Acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq#Acquisitions
  - blihp 6y ago
    I took it to be sarcastic. It was a spectacular fail as within about a year of the acquisition everything good they were doing had completely disappeared from view never to be seen again. That's not to say that DEC could have done any better on their own: with the absolute market dominance of Wintel at the time, they were flaming out as so many other mini and workstation companies did as their markets evaporated.
echelon 6y ago
I read your comment a few times and didn't understand what had happened at all. I figured it all hinged on the term innovator's dilemma, since you used it a few times. So I looked it up. Wow. Mind blown. I think we're all familiar with disruption, but Innovator's Dilemma poses a theory or framework as to why it happens. It's rather brilliant and seems to fit every case of market disruption I can think of. Incumbents serve existing markets and don't care about the small markets served by disruptive startups. They're making small, iterative improvements to their product. Disruptive tech eventually hits parabolic improvement and by this time the incumbent can't catch up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma The competing S-curve idea is brilliant. Thanks for sharing your anecdote and helping me learn something fundamental today.
bob33212 6y ago
To be fair even google and early investors in google including myself ( 2005 post IPO ) didn't understand how lucrative and important being a dominant search play would be.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  It is rather unfortunate that a single website won out in the search engine war and became the front page of the internet. It's more power than any one company should ever have. There was a time where Google refused to filter on human intervention and for political reasons, but that time has long passed.
  - zuppy 6y ago
    It won because competition was really bad. Altavista was not a good search engine. When you were looking for something, you had to use multiple tools, like Lycos, Hot Bot, Ask Jeeves and the multitude of the web portals that were available back then. I remember when I first saw Google, it was an instant decision and I never went back, that much was the difference in quality. Unfortunately for us, nobody found a working business model into search in time and this allowed Google to become too big for any viable competition.
    - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
      The problem is that how the market works is that once a monopoly has been established, that it's very hard for a competitor to challenge that, even if he have a better idea. Large players make lesser costs due to large vertical integration and bulk discounts. Even if I were to invent a new search algorithm that would be superior to Google's in terms of satisfaction with most searchers, I would be unable to get a wedge in. This is not so big a problem with say a power company, but with a search engine, it becomes the front page of the internet through which everyone goes — the end result is that Google commands a great deal of political influence simply with how it decides that it's algorithms should work and what pages to prioritize. Courts ordered Microsoft in the past to provide Windows users with notice of other web browsers, which was the primary way Internet Explorer lost it's dominance — perhaps it is time to order Google to provide users notice of other search engines and web browsers too as a matter of antitrust.
bsder 6y ago
> It was such an innovative company back in the 60s and 70s, but unlike IBM weren't able to reinvent themselves in first the new 80s world of PCs and then later internet. Classic case of innovators dilemma. No, this wasn't it. DEC actually had a quite good PC business which died when everybody died to the Asian manufacturers. DEC also had plenty of technical stuff as well as cash flow to ride it out. DEC was purely a result of executive level and board level malfeasance. After the board forced the founder Ken Olsen (who wasn't a great CEO but actually did have vision) out, Robert Palmer (who had no vision AND was incompetent) (and not the singer--the singer probably would have been better as CEO) was given marching orders to sell off the company. Which he did--with no vision whatsoever. Lots of people tried to fight against it, but any division which started righting itself immediately got flogged off. The patent lawsuit allowed DEC to jettison a bunch of the fab to Intel which then made them an attractive target to Compaq. People love to comment that the merger killed COMPAQ when the reality was the entire US domestic PC industry was completely collapsing. HOWEVER, to give you an idea as to how badly the "hostile giveaway" was managed, Compaq effectively bought DEC for less than their enterprise service annual revenue--about $2 billion per year. HP later milked this stream for more than a decade. So, in the middle of a PC industry collapse, no executive could figure out how to convert a $2 billion annual revenue stream for enterprise services plus a whole bunch of leading edge technology into a profitable company. This shows just how shit-tastic the executive management for both DEC and COMPAQ really were. But, hey, the DEC board got their stock bump and cashed out.
appleflaxen 6y ago
> how cool the DEC Hardware and Digital Unix was compared to the Sun Sparc and Solaris stuff I had to work on afterwards. I'd love to hear more about this, if you are willing to elaborate.
hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
Do people actually pronounce learned “learnt”? Where?

by pelle 6y ago

Crashprofessor 6y ago

I was in Nassau working between FSG/PM and the ACA/CORBA team. Recall many trips to the WRL, they always had the coolest stuff; network tunnels and firefly. Back then who you hated said a great deal and I recall several other CEs playing the silver bullet game to perfection. I'm curious the relation to the corporate blockchain?

at-fates-hands 6y ago
>> I'm curious the relation to the corporate blockchain? I think its the idea of companies seeing new tech and trying to leverage it somehow in their own businesses and failing - badly. Here's my own anecdotal evidence with blockchain: I work in a very large health care company. For about four months, there was a huge buzz around the company about how to leverage block chain in health care. The main idea was using block chain to manage patient accounts and PPE. We had all the execs bring in to do huge presentations. They brought in people from IBM to talk about Hyperledger and other block chain companies. They posted videos and articles about how this going to transform healthcare, we were all told this was going to be huge. They told people they were going to form a new team, hire developers and this was a going to be a huge focus in 2020. Six months later? You couldn't find a single resource on any of it on any of the internal company sites. All the presentations stopped, the execs stopped talking about block chain seemingly over night and it was like poof! the idea of block chain, or any mention of it or the "revolution" that supposed to follow? Completely disappeared into the abyss, never to be heard from again. I have no idea how much they sank into the notion that block chain could be used for health care, or how many people they hired or the contracts they signed with IBM, but I can only assume they lost a lot of money before they finally realized it wasn't going to work out.
- ptx 6y ago
  Would blockchain have been useful for healthcare? As I understand it, the main reason to use blockchain is having multiple parties intact without any party being trusted, so if you do have some central trusted authority it's pointless. There's also the requirement that the network has enough participants that no single party can gain a majority of the network's compute power, which seems a very iffy assumption with private/permissioned blockchains. So I don't see how blockchain is useful in a healthcare context. Please correct me if I'm wrong and enlightenen me if I'm missing something.
  - howlgarnish 6y ago
    You're not missing anything, and this lovely flowchart from NIST shows just how rare actual use cases are: https://thefinanser.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/NIST-flowchart.png https://thefinanser.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/NIST-flow... However, the execs making decisions about hot buzzwords like "blockchain" or "AIOps" etc neither understand nor care.

sradman 6y ago

Anyone familiar with Inverted Text Indexes when AltaVista was at its peak appreciated DEC's business model and execution. Google's PageRank pulled the rug out from under standard Inverted Text Indexes and quickly obsoleted the competition. Re-ordering the entire index nightly with potentially multiple passes is non-trivial and requires throwing a lot of hardware at the problem. In my opinion, marketing wasn't the problem; the problem was fast-following a disruptive technology without understanding how it worked. Once details of PageRank were published it was too late.

dumbfounder 6y ago
Why was it too late? They were still number one when pagerank was published, all they needed to do was put more resources into it. Google’s algorithms weren’t magic. The biggest problem was lack of vision, and willingness to bet on that vision. Investors in Google were swinging for the fences, that mentality would never have been at home at DEC.
- ericbarrett 6y ago
  Google’s algorithms were definitely “magic” by the standards of the time. Altavista never got much better than literal keyword search even when they introduced PageRank-style weighting. Google immediately had useful results from misspellings, questions, and related keywords, and only got better from there. Plus it was much faster; responses in 1-2 seconds versus 5-10 sometimes for AV. Maybe what you said is true, but they were deep in the hole as soon as Google launched.
  - alain94040 6y ago
    True, and Google is slowly being disrupted by the next generation of Internet search (looks like disruption happens every 20 years or so). The age where "search" is meant to return pages will eventually end. I know it's early, but you can think of GPT-3 as the next generation of search engines. You consume the entire "Internet knowledge", and you answer questions, by merging information from multiple sources. Not just returning one existing page. That's sort of what GPT-3 does, you just don't think of it as a search engine yet. Google felt "magic" in 2000. A search-oriented GPT-3 will feel "magic" soon.

Multicomp 6y ago

thanks for posting this. I love when HN brings together the principal actors and primary sources. OT: I wish we could use webmaster more often, even though thats a much murkier proposition in the days of product managers deploying the new site via CDeployment.

tus88 6y ago

> It is sad in many ways to see what happened to DEC (probably more so than AltaVista). It was such an innovative company back in the 60s and 70s, They should have merged with a PC make obviously. > but unlike IBM weren't able to reinvent themselves in first the new 80s world of PCs and then later internet. Ironically IBM did fail to reinvent itself despite inventing the PC and it's cake was stolen from it.

sradman 6y ago
> They should have merged with a PC make obviously. DEC was acquired by Compaq [1]: > In 1998, Compaq acquired Digital Equipment Corporation for a then-industry record of US$9 billion. The merger made Compaq, at the time, the world's second largest computer maker in the world in terms of revenue behind IBM. Maybe you were being sarcastic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq#Acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq#Acquisitions
- blihp 6y ago
  I took it to be sarcastic. It was a spectacular fail as within about a year of the acquisition everything good they were doing had completely disappeared from view never to be seen again. That's not to say that DEC could have done any better on their own: with the absolute market dominance of Wintel at the time, they were flaming out as so many other mini and workstation companies did as their markets evaporated.

echelon 6y ago

I read your comment a few times and didn't understand what had happened at all. I figured it all hinged on the term innovator's dilemma, since you used it a few times. So I looked it up. Wow. Mind blown. I think we're all familiar with disruption, but Innovator's Dilemma poses a theory or framework as to why it happens. It's rather brilliant and seems to fit every case of market disruption I can think of. Incumbents serve existing markets and don't care about the small markets served by disruptive startups. They're making small, iterative improvements to their product. Disruptive tech eventually hits parabolic improvement and by this time the incumbent can't catch up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma The competing S-curve idea is brilliant. Thanks for sharing your anecdote and helping me learn something fundamental today.

bob33212 6y ago

To be fair even google and early investors in google including myself ( 2005 post IPO ) didn't understand how lucrative and important being a dominant search play would be.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
It is rather unfortunate that a single website won out in the search engine war and became the front page of the internet. It's more power than any one company should ever have. There was a time where Google refused to filter on human intervention and for political reasons, but that time has long passed.
- zuppy 6y ago
  It won because competition was really bad. Altavista was not a good search engine. When you were looking for something, you had to use multiple tools, like Lycos, Hot Bot, Ask Jeeves and the multitude of the web portals that were available back then. I remember when I first saw Google, it was an instant decision and I never went back, that much was the difference in quality. Unfortunately for us, nobody found a working business model into search in time and this allowed Google to become too big for any viable competition.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    The problem is that how the market works is that once a monopoly has been established, that it's very hard for a competitor to challenge that, even if he have a better idea. Large players make lesser costs due to large vertical integration and bulk discounts. Even if I were to invent a new search algorithm that would be superior to Google's in terms of satisfaction with most searchers, I would be unable to get a wedge in. This is not so big a problem with say a power company, but with a search engine, it becomes the front page of the internet through which everyone goes — the end result is that Google commands a great deal of political influence simply with how it decides that it's algorithms should work and what pages to prioritize. Courts ordered Microsoft in the past to provide Windows users with notice of other web browsers, which was the primary way Internet Explorer lost it's dominance — perhaps it is time to order Google to provide users notice of other search engines and web browsers too as a matter of antitrust.

bsder 6y ago

> It was such an innovative company back in the 60s and 70s, but unlike IBM weren't able to reinvent themselves in first the new 80s world of PCs and then later internet. Classic case of innovators dilemma. No, this wasn't it. DEC actually had a quite good PC business which died when everybody died to the Asian manufacturers. DEC also had plenty of technical stuff as well as cash flow to ride it out. DEC was purely a result of executive level and board level malfeasance. After the board forced the founder Ken Olsen (who wasn't a great CEO but actually did have vision) out, Robert Palmer (who had no vision AND was incompetent) (and not the singer--the singer probably would have been better as CEO) was given marching orders to sell off the company. Which he did--with no vision whatsoever. Lots of people tried to fight against it, but any division which started righting itself immediately got flogged off. The patent lawsuit allowed DEC to jettison a bunch of the fab to Intel which then made them an attractive target to Compaq. People love to comment that the merger killed COMPAQ when the reality was the entire US domestic PC industry was completely collapsing. HOWEVER, to give you an idea as to how badly the "hostile giveaway" was managed, Compaq effectively bought DEC for less than their enterprise service annual revenue--about $2 billion per year. HP later milked this stream for more than a decade. So, in the middle of a PC industry collapse, no executive could figure out how to convert a $2 billion annual revenue stream for enterprise services plus a whole bunch of leading edge technology into a profitable company. This shows just how shit-tastic the executive management for both DEC and COMPAQ really were. But, hey, the DEC board got their stock bump and cashed out.

appleflaxen 6y ago

> how cool the DEC Hardware and Digital Unix was compared to the Sun Sparc and Solaris stuff I had to work on afterwards. I'd love to hear more about this, if you are willing to elaborate.

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago

Do people actually pronounce learned “learnt”? Where?