Filo Makes a Point

Thanks for all the posts on questions to ask Jerry and David. Turns out, we spent a lot of time on history and also on looking forward to the next ten years. We didn’t focus so much on the present. When I reminded Yahoo’s founders that they had ten years of experience running the site – they started in earnest in 1994 – both turned reflective. It’s not like they didn’t know it, of course, but there’s something about taking the time to think about that – ten years – that makes for a good conversation. I asked if they still believed in the vision and hype of the mid 90s – about how the internet was going to change everything – and they both said they did, but that timing was everything. It takes a lot longer than we’d like for basic things to change. Then Filo came out with a great line about the early promise of the internet – that we’d all become creators and producers of content – and how long it takes to fulfill:

That was the promise of the internet from day one -when Mosaic came out the whole idea was that anybody could publish now, that was the new thing …yet it took this long to get to simple blogging… If you said ten years ago that you could have blogging in ten years, and that will be the extent of it, people wouldn’t have been that impressed.

Indeed. In 1994, anyone claiming that in ten years, we’d have a robust self-publishing movement like blogging would have been drummed out of the room for a lack of vision. Despite Geocities or Tripod, it takes time for the ship of culture to change course. Makes me rethink my own sense of what might come ten years from now…