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In January 2001 the cash crisis came to a head. Desperately in need of new servers, Williams made an appeal to Blogger’s users for donations. Close to $17,000 came in, which was enough to buy new hardware but not to pay salaries.69 Hourihan demanded that Williams step aside as CEO, and when he refused, she quit. “On Monday I resigned from the company I co-founded,” she wrote on her blog. “I’m still crying and crying and crying.”70 The other employees, by then six in total, walked out as well.
Williams posted a long entry titled “And Then There Was One” on his own blog. “We are out of money, and I have lost my team. . . . The last two years have been a long, hard, exciting, educational, once-in-a-lifetime, painful, and, ultimately, very rewarding and worthwhile journey for me.” Vowing to keep the service alive, even if he had to do it alone, he ended with a postscript: “If anyone wants to share some office space for a while, lemme know. I could use the cost savings (and the company).”71
Most people would have quit at that point. There was no money for rent, no one to keep the servers ru
But ingrained in Williams’s hardscrabble heritage was the patience of a corn farmer and the stubbor
A few people expressed sympathy and offered help, most notably Dan Bricklin, a beloved and collaborative tech leader who had cocreated VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet program. “I didn’t like the idea of Blogger being lost in the dotcom crash,” Bricklin said.75 After reading Williams’s forlorn post, he sent an email asking if there was anything he could do to help. They agreed to meet when Bricklin, who lived in Boston, came to an O’Reilly conference in San Francisco. Over sushi at a nearby restaurant, Bricklin told the tale of how, years earlier, when his own company was foundering, he had run into Mitch Kapor of Lotus. Though competitors, they shared a collaborative hacker ethic, so Kapor offered a deal that helped Bricklin stay personally solvent. Bricklin went on to found a company, Trellix, that made its own website publishing system. Paying forward Kapor’s band-of-hackers helpfulness to a semicompetitor, Bricklin worked out a deal for Trellix to license Blogger’s software for $40,000, thus keeping it alive. Bricklin was, above all, a nice guy.
Throughout 2001 Williams worked around the clock from his apartment or in borrowed space to keep Blogger ru
Things began to turn around in 2002. He launched Blogger Pro, which users paid for, and with the help of a new partner got a licensing deal in Brazil. The world of blogging was growing exponentially, which made Blogger a hot commodity. In October, with some prodding from Williams’s old publishing boss, Tim O’Reilly, Google came calling. It was still mainly a search engine and had no history of buying other companies, but it made an offer to buy Blogger. Williams accepted.
Williams’s simple little product helped to democratize publishing. “Push-button publishing for the people” was his mantra. “I love the world of publishing, and I’m fiercely independent minded, both of which came from growing up on a remote farm,” he said. “When I found a way to let people publish on the Internet, I knew I could help give power and voice to millions.”
At least initially, Blogger was primarily a tool for publishing rather than for interactive discussion. “Instead of promoting dialogue, it let people just get on a soap box,” Williams admitted. “The Internet has a community side and a publishing side to it. There are people who obsess about the community part more than I do. I’m more driven by the publishing of knowledge side of it, because I grew up learning about the world from what other people published, and I’m not a huge participant in the community side.”77
However, most digital tools eventually get commandeered for social purposes, that being the nature of humans. The blogosphere evolved into being a community rather than merely a collection of soap boxes. “It ended up turning into a community, even though we all had our own blogs, because we would comment on and link to each other,” Williams said years later. “There was definitely a community there, just as real as any mailing list or bulletin board, and eventually I came to appreciate that.”78
Williams went on to be a cofounder of Twitter, a social networking and micropublishing service, and then Medium, a publishing site designed to promote collaboration and sharing. In the process, he realized that he did indeed value that community aspect of the Internet as much as the publishing side of it. “As a farm boy from Nebraska, co
WARD CUNNINGHAM, JIMMY WALES, AND WIKIS
When he launched the Web in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee intended it to be used as a collaboration tool, which is why he was dismayed that the Mosaic browser did not give users the ability to edit the Web pages they were viewing. It turned Web surfers into passive consumers of published content. That lapse was partly mitigated by the rise of blogging, which encouraged user-generated content. In 1995 another medium was invented that went further toward facilitating collaboration on the Web. It was called a wiki, and it worked by allowing users to modify Web pages—not by having an editing tool in their browser but by clicking and typing directly onto Web pages that ran wiki software.
The application was developed by Ward Cu
To do this he modified a superb software product developed by one of Apple’s most enchanting i