Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet. Regula Bochsler
and some basic linking between various cells to allow customers to make profit-and-loss balance sheets like the ones the brothers had already created for their shop. Their next, more sophisticated idea was to simplify the tricky coded commands of Lotus 1–2–3 with easy-to-understand English. They worked hard to write a program that would allow the user to type in ‘print this’ instead of cumbersome commands.
Mitch Kapor discovered the Gross brothers’ language-based product and, as Bill Gross remembered, his reaction was ‘wow, wow, wow, incredible’. For the young Bill, still only twenty-six years old, this was truly a moment to remember. ‘It was like we achieved everything we could dream of with a compliment like that from Mitch.’ For Bill Gross, praise from one of the industry’s leading lights carried real import. In what was becoming a typical strategy of the fast-moving software industry, Lotus bought up their competition, paying $10 million for the Gross brothers’ software company. Henceforth Bill and Larry commuted between their offices in Pasadena and Lotus’s in Boston.
By this time, Lotus had more than a thousand employees and had become a huge bureaucracy. Shortly after buying out the Gross brothers, Mitch Kapor resigned from his post as Lotus’s Chief Executive, bored of the dull, operational command. Within Lotus, Bill Gross was intrigued by what he saw as the growing indolence of his new colleagues, and came to believe that they lacked inspiration and commitment purely because they had no stake in the business beyond their monthly salary. As a company man, he felt that his body was changing – the ‘new chemistry’ taking the edge off his ambition. No longer was he selling ‘his’ product; he was just a cog in a huge machine. As the ‘fun’ aspects of business began to fade, Gross resolved to remember the lessons he’d learned during this period as a salary man. He left Lotus in 1990, after five years, to become once again the master of his own destiny.
Not long afterwards, Bill Gross started the second of the businesses that later gave him credibility in the Internet boom. When discussing this period in the years to come, he would tell the press that his original intention had been to take a year off to pursue his creative yen. Now that work and play were no longer distinguishable, he had planned to pursue his leisure interests with the same determined diligence – not to mention hubristic grand ambition – as that with which he had coded software. To some, he mentioned that he had wanted to write a symphony; to others, that he had wanted to paint. He took up the hobby of copying Old Masters, brushstroke by brushstroke; his copy of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers hung above his desk for years. He explained, ‘There’s all kinds of violence in the brushstrokes. I love to see what it feels like being creative in different areas.’ But the power of the computer – a computer with the capacity to make art – was enough to divert him from his own artistic ambitions.
Late in 1989, the press began trumpeting a new type of computer and related method of communication: multimedia. The idea that a computer ought to be able to play music, display pictures and movies as well as running text programs had already been around for a while. However, until the middle of the 1980s, most micro-computers – besides game consoles or niche products like the Amiga – were text-based, because they were not powerful enough to accommodate the complex demands of graphics. Computer memory, though, had rapidly decreased in cost, while the speed of central processors had accelerated. And so, by the autumn of 1989, Apple and IBM were busy promoting ‘multimedia machines’, promising interactive son et lumières. Business Week hurrahed in a headline ‘It’s a PC, it’s a TV – It’s Multimedia’, and claimed it would ‘change the way people work, learn and play’. The rest of the press followed, and multimedia was soon a fully fledged business fashion.
Bill Gross’s first experience of this new technology came courtesy of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, one of the first multimedia CDs, on which users could not only listen to the entire work but also hear a full-length running commentary and read essays about the composer’s life and work. Gross bought a $5,500 Apple computer just so he could play it. He described his reaction as having ‘goosebumps all over my body about how great Beethoven was. It let me in on a non-academic way to discover beautiful things on my own … It opened me up to the beauty of music.’ The discovery coincided with the first day of school of his four-year-old son, David. Waving goodbye to him from the family car, Gross thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m handing him off to the educational system. Their software stinks, and teachers aren’t paid enough. I really should do something about that.’
For Gross, the solution to these problems was to begin hacking code again. He had leaped on the bandwagon of a rising trend once before, with Lotus 1–2–3. Now he was about to do it again, by taking the new power of multimedia computing to the world of education. If children could play with software programs as if they were games, he reasoned, they could discover knowledge along the way. To make this happen, he set up a company, Knowledge Adventure.
Their first product was self-titled and hit the retailers’ shelves at the end of 1991, promising ‘The Most Exciting Journey of All’. Once the home user had installed the software on to their PC, an image would appear on screen: Neil Armstrong planting the American flag on the moon; hidden behind this were many further layers of information. The computer mouse – at the time a relatively new addition to the PC – allowed the user to manipulate an onscreen pointer and to click on various parts of a chosen image to reveal these further levels. For example, click on the flag on the first image and the program would deliver a section containing text and images about Betsy Ross sewing the first American flag in 1770. Click on Armstrong’s lunar-landing module and a photo of the space-shuttle Columbia’s maiden voyage in 1981 would appear. And so on. Each of these new images in turn could be explored further. What Knowledge Adventure lacked in coherent narrative it more than made up for with its barrage of pretty pictures and fascinating factoids.
Knowledge Adventure went on to release Bug Adventure, Body Adventure, Dinosaur Adventure and Space Adventure, all featuring similar journeys through their respective subjects. And as home-computer technology improved, Gross added more sophisticated features to his software – first sound and then video.
Knowledge Adventure was a very successful venture. Within a few years, the company was selling almost $20 million worth of products a year and became a media darling. In 1993, it was chosen as one of Fortune magazine’s ‘25 Cool Companies’. Gross had proved that not only could he write programs for the business sector, but also that he had the common touch with that most difficult of consumer targets: the children’s market. As a consequence he developed his glorious reputation as a serial entrepreneur, someone who could repeatedly hit the jackpot of turning ideas into profitable reality.
Nonetheless Gross stuck to his hacker lifestyle. He often worked from home, and held parties to help his employees dream up new ideas for products. One reporter wrote that Gross spent his time sitting in the dark in the study of his Pasadena home, listening to Mozart, reading history and directing the efforts of other programmers. Gross himself said, ‘I couldn’t have imagined a better life.’
As he became more successful, he dealt less with the dull, everyday details of running a business and was increasingly sought out by the media, investors and potential partners as a kind of visionary. Michael Wolff, who ran a publishing company at the time, recalls: ‘I was about to meet with Gross when someone I knew said, in a cautionary tone, “Remember he’s drunk the Kool-Aid.”’ This was a Silicon Valley phrase that became a widely adopted idiom to describe the irrational excitement and exuberance of the Internet goldrush years. The term was an allusion to cult leader Jim Jones who in 1978 forced his followers to live in the Guyanese jungle where, in his final show of strength, he gave them the softdrink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide; 638 adults and 276 children were killed. Bill Gross had ‘drunk the Kool-Aid’ insofar as he fervently cast technology, new media and the seismic transformation of life by the Internet in truly messianic terms. So Michael Wolff hit on a simple strategy to impress the evangelist, ‘He was a believer, therefore I should be a believer too.’
Having this kind of visionary talent made it difficult for Gross to concentrate on the more menial tasks involved in running a business. He described himself as ‘the most unfocused man on the planet’, and constantly flitted from one idea for a new company to another, squirrelling money away for special projects. At times, Knowledge Adventure