Networking and Internetworking - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 60

Andreessen managed to commercialize his invention quickly. In early
1994, he was approached by Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics,
who suggested that they commercialize the invention. Andreessen agreed,
but apparently the University of Illinois objected to this idea. Like the
University of Pennsylvania a half-century before it, Illinois saw the value
of the work done on its campus, but it failed to see the much greater value
of the people who did that work. Clark left Silicon Graphics and with
Andreessen founded Mosaic Communications that spring. The University
of Illinois asserted its claim to the name Mosaic, so the company changed
its name to Netscape Communications Corporation. Clark and Andreessen
visited Champaign-Urbana and quickly hired many of the programmers
who had worked on the software. Netscape introduced its version of the
browser in September 1994. The University of Illinois continued to offer
Mosaic, in a licensing agreement with another company, but Netscape's
software quickly supplanted Mosaic as the most popular version of the
program.
2.4.2 Applications of the World Wide Web
Berners-Lee used the analogy of the market economy to describe the com-
mercial potential of the WWW. He realized that the WWW offered the poten-
tial to conduct business in cyberspace without human interaction, rather than
the traditional way of buyers and sellers coming together to do business in
the market place. Anyone can trade with anyone else except that they do not
have to go to the market square to do so. The invention of the WWW was
announced in August 1991, and the growth of the Web has been phenomenal
since then. The growth has often been exponential, and exponential growth
rate curves became a feature of newly formed Internet companies and their
business plans.
The WWW is revolutionary in that
• No single organization is controlling the Web
• No single computer is controlling the Web
• Millions of computers are interconnected
• It is an enormous market place of millions (billions) of users
• The Web is not located in one physical location
• The Web is a space and not a physical thing
The WWW has been applied to many areas including
• Travel industry (booking flights, train tickets, and hotels)
• e-marketing
• Portal sites (such as Yahoo! and Hotmail)