I've always been amused by the texts that talk about what opportunities were lost this or that company. It is as if a company or project is going to be successful regardless of who leads. However, the computer world is full of examples of successful projects and technologies that have not been set and no fruit set. For example, it has left on this blog, we have the opportunity lost by Xerox PARC invented technologies in its laboratories at the 70, which were imposed on the market in 80, and many others who enriched and non-Xerox (the graphical interface, the laser printer, Ethernet network ...).
Another example too. Commodore was able to buy Apple in the 70's. An opportunity lost by the Commodore? Possibly not. "Apple would have been the same under the guidance of Commodore or would have been lost in the oblivion of history like so many others? Compaq, the leading manufacturer of PCs in the 90's, could also be bought by Apple in the 80's. "Apple missed the opportunity to become the No. 1 PC or Compaq would have been lost in the idiosyncrasies of the apple company?
Today I will talk about a missed opportunity, perhaps come too soon, perhaps for business blindness. But better start at the beginning.
A new generation of computer may only ring the company they DEC (acronym for Digital Equipment Corporation ) as a manufacturer of large machines that lost for the Paleolithic of information, something we can sound like many of us UNIVAC. DEC was a company that could say that practically invented the minicomputer market, much less powerful machines and pretentious large systems of the time but also much cheaper and with fewer requirements, say, environmental. This market, the minicomputers, was to develop and grow, making the DEC in the second half of the 80 in the # 2 in the computer world (and here we talk about computers in general, both software and hardware).
However, the 80 came with very very deep changes throughout the business ecosystem turned over to the new paradigms and business models. There were companies that have adapted very well (eg HP), others were hard to adapt but eventually became as IBM, and others were unable to adapt and over the years were getting smaller until they finally disappear. Like, for example, DEC.
DEC
The situation in the mid 90's was a bit tricky. I have a couple of years without generating profits (his latest results in 1995 were 2,000 million losses). However, they had to his credit several technologies that could turn around your situation.
One was the Alpha processor. The chips were light years ahead in technology and performance of their x86 equivalents and were generally much higher than its competitors Sun and Silicon Graphics. However, DEC was a company throughout its history of minicomputers and therefore had failed to take advantage of the Alpha processor (in fact, reached 18 months delay to release for the simple reason that a microprocessor, however advanced it was, sounded a personal computer or as much workstation. DEC minicomputers did not single-person machines.) However, there was an internal project that he could take advantage of great performance and capabilities of the 64-bit Alpha processor (yes, still in 1995). The project consisted in using the enormous bandwidth available for DEC had the time, traveled the World Wide Web completely and create an index that could be consulted at any time. His name was AltaVista, and although in the mid 90's was just an internal project, and therefore only used from the DEC's intranet, those of the company that used it were in love with him.
What was so special about AltaVista? Seen through the eyes of 2010, not much, mainly because both Google and Bing do the same. But remember we are talking about 1995, Google did not exist Bing and he had more than a decade to be born, so let's see what the situation was at that time. The main website to mid 90's was, undoubtedly, Yahoo. However, Yahoo was not a search but it was just a directory. What does that mean? Then there was a spider to analyze the web looking for new links and including them in a weighted index that would be available then it simply was a list of websites stored. Yes, like a yellow pages or telephone directory. To understand the success of Yahoo, we must understand that before this there if you wanted to access a web-based resource management had to know of it or of any site that we link. Yahoo was simply a collection of sites, so you just had to memorize www.yahoo.com and once there, find what you wanted. Yes
had, however, projects to create search engines. Most of them were projects with very limited or not particularly ambitious objectives. For example, searchers had processed only titles from sites and not the content, or some who analyzed the contents, but of course, to encompass the web TOO (about 18,000 sites in early 1995) was needed a lot of bandwidth and processing power enough, otherwise you to finish processing all websites the result would be useless by the ever-changing nature of it. Also, of course, it was necessary to create a proper intertaz to interact with the entire system to perform searches, and most browsers "pure" of the time were quite cryptic (some had to connect via telnet and learned a few commands to perform a query). AltaVista had
solved all the problems of search engines before it. They had the huge (for the time) bandwidth of DEC, had a powerful processor and several parallel processing units all the information gathered by the spiders (so that the index was quickly obsolete) and also offered very clean interface for the time.
So in 1996 DEC agreed to publicly open your firewall to make public the AltaVista service. Like any business, the ultimate goal of this movement was to make money, but ... DEC sought how to win?
This is the part where it shows that what matters is not have the right technology but knowing what to do with it. If you do not have the possibility always exists that you can buy or at least license, but if you have it and do not know what to do with it, is naught badly.
As this was the problem of DEC. DEC for the dome (not project managers AltaVista), the engine was a great opportunity to get good positive publicity ... to sell computers with Alpha processors. That is, for them AltaVista was not a public demo of how great it was their hardware. It's as if Pixar had wanted to do business by selling computers that created Toy Story instead of doing business the film itself.
Were managers DEC blind? Yes, but because the world was full of blind by those then. In 1996, when Compaq bought DEC, the amount of the transaction was approximately $ 9,600 million, of which, in respect of the acquisition of AltaVista, paid $ 0 (and why should have been paid anything? It was just a demo and not generated not a single $. Maybe it was good publicity, but it was only, at least for the time, expense). Did despite the blindness of their parent companies have become AltaVista Google before Google even existed? The technology was there, but not the business model. When AltaVista was made public, the mentality of the time was to capture Internet users and keep them inside as long as possible. The fashion at that time was to create portals where clump together all the services that a user might need in a way to remain always within the portal. These services ranging from email to weather information, news, chat rooms and dozens of other services. Despite the fact that AltaVista had advocates of maintaining clean and simple as AltaVista, ie focus on search technology and consultation, the triumph of the more "traditional" portal to create a large, heavy laden with a multitude of services.
What was finally AltaVista? Compaq sold to CMGI in June 1999 by $ 2,300 million, which wanted to bring it to bag the next year. However, the dot-com bubble had burst, so they stopped the IPO. In 2003, CMGI AltaVista sold the site to Overture Services, Inc. for $ 140 million. Today, AltaVista www.altavista.com still operational, but as an unimportant minor player in the world of web browsers. And this is just an example of having the best technology does not give you guaranteed success. That is why when I see any news that this or that company could buy a few years ago euros for four current or a large company that sold for almost nothing a giant present I can not help but smile. The opportunities presented to us daily, sometimes recognizable, sometimes not ...
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