Brief Reflections on the Brevity of the Web
Motivation: I was buried deep in the minutia of measuring the impact of a change in the software I was working on, and suddenly thought “where is the retired professional I can ask about how they did this?” Where is the retired software Product Analyst that spent their entire career on cloud based mobile apps? Well, they don’t exist! It is both humbling and exciting to realize how new all this is, and while it feels established and understood, there is so much we don’t know. So much we can learn.
The First Forms
When was the first web form put up on the internet? We live in a world of HTML and interactive web pages and apps, but how often do we stop and think about how quickly it is changing, and how little we really understand how it impacts how we buy and sell stuff?
While the first web browsers became publicly available around 1990, the first “sites” were static pages. The original HTML spec didn’t include any of the “form” input type tags. It wasn’t until 1993 that forms start appearing on pages. As of writing that makes the ability for websites to have fillable forms 28 years old. While we have decades, centuries of study on how to best design paper forms and how people use them, the web form is effectively a blip on the time line. We barely have time for Human-Computer Interaction practitioners to assemble and distribute insights into our behaviors before a disruptive innovation changes what we all do again!
One of the first forms on the internet, circa 1993. https://www.ventureharbour.com/the-evolution-of-web-forms/
But to access those early pages you had to have a dial-up modem that used your land-line phone connection, which was the only phone for the entire household (in the US mobile adoption wouldn’t reach 85% saturation until 2008 (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/). At my house the internet connection was billed by the minute, equivalent to long-distance calls, and I repeatedly got in trouble with my parents for running up the internet bill! Broadband access was at 50% in 2000 in the US and only reached the 80% range in 2012. You could have the fanciest web site with a paid marketing budget, but until 10 years ago most Americans would not have access to find it.
The ability to effectively market a product on the Internet, and use the Internet as a primary method to reach buyers, is younger than my 6th grader! Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), the practice of carefully tweaking web pages to get ranked as high as possible in search results (and a critical job in online marketing), only became a going concern in the late 90s with the rise of Google (https://www.bluefrogdm.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-seo). In most of the “careers” that Americans talk about, and are taught at colleges and trade schools, we have a previous generation of practitioners to learn from. Yes, all careers are evolving in the age of Info Tech, but anything that is entirely Internet centric is entirely new. It’s very exciting, and we just don’t know where it will go!
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Remember when “buying software” involved a stack of discs or DVDs that provided a tangible product you could hold in your hands? I knew I owned my copy because I had a shelf of discs I could touch. In the 90s it was inconceivable that one would buy software and have it delivered ‘over the air,’ let alone that one would pay a subscription fee for it. As recently as 2014 I received a weighty stack of discs with half a terabyte of software that took a day to install (only 8 years ago!).
The first company that is frequently cited is Salesforce which proved the viability of Software-as-a-Service by the early 2000s. Sometime around 2010 the market found a tipping point and SaaS becomes the dominant form of software development and delivery. I remember as one-by-one all of the professional software packages I owned converted from the DVD stack to a cloud based recurring subscription model. Particularly notable was the move of the Adobe Creative Suite to “Creative Cloud” in 2012/13. Did I “own” my copy any more? Did I ever, really, or was the ephemerality of software always destined to find this more ideal mode of distribution and possession?
Hiring Software: Jobs to be Done
If Software is a service industry then I no longer “buy” my apps, I “hire” them to provide a service (C. Christensen formulates this in his “Jobs to be Done” theory). I hire a music app to recommend new songs and set a good mood while I wash the dishes. I hire a map app to reliably get me where I’m going. I hire a suite of professional music recording apps, integrations, and plug-ins to enable my creative music making. And if any of them do a crummy job I “fire” them and find a replacement.
Not even 10 years ago (definitely younger than my 6th grader) does SaaS become the way apps are marketed and sold. With anything this revolutionary and different, how much do we still have to learn? A year feels like an eternity in this space, but looking back, we are in exceedingly novel and untrodden land. It feels like a wildly disruptive innovation could be around the corner at any moment. Whatever it is (VR? Ubiquitous smart watches? IoT?) It will provide even more new territory to explore, and opportunity for new products and solutions.
Through all of the brief history of consumer software the one constant has been us (yes, “software” has been around a few decades longer, but remember when “user interface” was a pretty novel concept? WYSIWYG editors have only been mainstream for about 2 decades).
People. We might spend a lot more time on our smart phone browsing social feeds than we could 20 years ago, but the underlying struggles we experience in our lives are not dramatically changed. We have the same fundamental issues (food, shelter, climate between ±40° C) that humans have always had. Maybe we can transpose our need for community to a distributed network of remote interest groups, but our social nature has always been with us. Now we have new things, SaaS and web forms, to try and address our common trials and tribulations.
And who knows, maybe we’ll make some beautiful things, learn more about ourselves, and transformationally address some of our societal challenges along the way. We can always hope!
January, 2022
Dr. Ben Smith is a Data Scientist and thinker, fascinated by the appearance of computers in our daily lives, creativity, and human struggles. He has had the privilege to think, learn, and write at the University of Illinois, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Cleveland Institute of Art, Case Western Reserve U., IUPUI, and at Boardable: Board Management Software, Inc.
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