The Business Book

174

W

hen British computer

scientist Tim Berners-

Lee harnessed the

Internet to develop the World Wide

Web, he was simply creating a

way of sharing information. It was

not viewed as a money-making

exercise. However, the Internet’s

disruptive power soon became clear:

it would change business and our

way of life, enabling commerce to

be conducted by a profusion of

individuals and organizations.

Early search engines were

invented as an increasing amount

of information became available on

the web. Larry Page and Sergey

Brin, two US computer science

students, designed a search engine

that could quickly search all the

available documents and generate

highly relevant results. In

September 1998 they set up a

work space in a friend’s garage and

opened a bank account in the name

of Google Inc. The soon-to-be giant

company began, as Page said, with

no more than “a computer and a

part-time person.”

Within a year Google had 40

employees, and in June 2000

announced its first billion-URL

index, making it officially the

world’s largest search engine.

By 2013, Google employed 30,000

people worldwide, of whom around

53 percent worked in research and

development, which may explain

the company’s phenomenal growth.

Doing business on the web

As two-way communication over

the Internet became a reality

during the 1990s, organizations

began to see the potential offered

by the new e-commerce platform.

The first books were sold online

in 1992, and in 1994 Pizza Hut in

Santa Cruz, California enabled

people to order a pizza delivery

via the Internet.

The idea of online selling took off

in 1995 when Jeff Bezos dispatched

the first book sold by Amazon.com,

then located in his Seattle garage.

Around the same time, software

programmer Pierre Omidyar was

starting a simple website called

AuctionWeb from his San Jose

living room. The first product he

posted for sale was a broken laser

pointer. It sold for $14.83. Omidyar

recognized the Internet’s power to

reach individual customers,

anywhere in the world, when he

checked whether the buyer

Larry Page Born in 1973 in Michigan,

Lawrence (Larry) Page was

exposed to computer technology

at an early age; his father was a

pioneer in computer science and

his mother taught computer

programming. Page studied

engineering at the University of

Michigan and then completed a

Masters in computer engineering

at Stanford University.

On his first visit to the campus,

Page was shown around by fellow

postgraduate student Sergey Brin,

who would later be the co-founder

of Google. During a research

project in 1997, Page and Brin

created a search engine called

BackRub, which operated on

Stanford servers until it outgrew

their capacity. The pair worked

together on a bigger and better

version, which they named

Google after the mathematical

term “Googol”—the number 1

followed by 100 zeros. Page and

Brin were jointly awarded the

Marconi Prize in 2004, and Page

was elected to the US National

Academy of Engineering in

2004. Today Google is the
      world’s most popular search
      engine, handling more than 5
      billion search queries every day.

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

Internet business

KEY DATES

1974 US computer scientists

Vent Cerf and Bob Kahn

design the first Transmission

Control Program, enabling

computers to talk to each other.

1977 The first electronic mail

(“email”) is sent, via the US

Department of Defense’s

ARPANET.

1991 The World Wide Web

(WWW), the first widely

accessible system to share

data files via the Internet, is

released by Tim Berners-Lee.

1993 Netscape launches

Mosaic, the first commercial

Internet browser.

2013 More than two million

third-party sellers use Amazon

to reach their customers.