Tumbling Duke

Do you remember Duke?? Duke is the tumbling Java Man that first made his appearance with the release of Netscape 2.0B1 in October 1995.

I remember exactly where I was when I upgraded to v2 and started playing around with Java applets. Do you?

I downloaded the upgrade over my 9600b modem and installed it. Clicked around and found some of the new Java features and the Tumbling Duke demo.

When I saw him flipping around, I was mesmerized. I knew that instant that this web thing was going to be BIG. Really BIG. Netscape was already big, having gone public a few months earlier (Aug. '95) so that really wasn’t news to anyone in the Valley back then.

What hit me that moment, though, was the full potential of the browser. I'm a pretty tech savvy guy and I knew how all this stuff actually worked. But when I saw it come together within the browser, it all suddenly came to life. All the separate pieces were already there and fairly well understood (by me, at least), but when the were put together in this new way, it really got my attention.

My imagination ran wild with the possibilities of what people might do with the browser and the new apps that could run in it. I've forgotten all the details of who said what, when, but Netscape was touting the browser as the new platform that was going to marginalize the OS. It was quite a frenzy as I recall.

It all made sense, technically, but something didn't quite seem to fit. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but I didn't really see how this browser thingy was going to topple Microsoft.

You might also remember that earlier that same year the interactive television and video on demand bubble had burst. Who could forget Larry Ellison saying that VOD was going to change entertainment as we knew it. At the time, I was working for nCUBE, a supplier of Massively Parallel Servers that were being used in several dozen of these VOD trials, so I was pretty close to all that activity as well.

Something about that didn't seem right either.

Well, it turned out that neither Larry's VOD vision, nor Netscape's platform strategy ever really ever got off the ground.

Often things don't turn out exactly as they're planned, but that doesn't mean that the ideas were bad. Maybe just a little before their time.

So, here we are 10 years later and, sure enough, a slightly different version of Larry's VOD vision is actually beginning to take hold. And what do you know, Netscape's Platform strategy seems to be taking shape as well.

So why Tumbling Duke?

Well, earlier this year when I first tried Google Maps I instantly traveled back in time to that moment 10 years ago when I first saw Duke. To me, dragging the map in the frame was the equivalent of Duke doing his summersaults.

My jaw dropped and I said this is going to be BIG, Really BIG. Like then, I knew all about the individual pieces XML, JavaScript, etc., but integrated in this new fangled way really brought it to life. Just like Duke did.

I've been meaning to start this blog for several months now. But until now I really didn't have much to say that wasn’t already being said. I've been lurking around a bunch of blogs, and found myself returning to a few on a regular basis.

But now it's come time to start contributing to the discussion and make my voice heard.

I'm working on something now that’s evolving pretty rapidly and a lot of the details are still pretty vague. But one thing I know for sure, it's gonna be BIG. Really BIG.

I think.

To be honest, I don't know what it's going to be since I'm still trying to figure it all out. But one thing I know for sure, it's going to be fun trying to make it all work.

And that's what this blog is about; my journey digging into this new thing, seeing if any of it makes sense and if I can make something out of it.