Читать книгу Customer Success - Mehta Nick - Страница 7

In the fall of 1995, John McCaskey walked into the Stanford Bookstore in Palo Alto, California, and bought several books, Foundations of World Wide Web Programming with HTML & CGI, HTML & CGI Unleashed, and O'Reilly's Programming Perl among them. At the time, McCaskey was a marketing director working for a company named Silicon Graphics (SGI). Despite his marketing title, McCaskey was an engineer at heart, and his new book collection had a purpose greater than simply a hobby. His intent was to reprogram an internal application, lightly used by the SGI marketing community, called MYOB (mine your own business). MYOB was a business intelligence (BI) tool, built on top of Business Objects. Its intent was to provide insights to the marketers regarding the sales of their products. As McCaskey's version started to take shape, it became known as MYOB Lite.

That very same year, on the other side of town, Paul Graham, self-proclaimed hacker and future Silicon Valley icon, and his friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell were starting a company called Viaweb. Viaweb was also the name of their application, originally known as Webgen, which allowed users to build and host their own online stores with little technical expertise.

Both MYOB Lite and Viaweb were wildly successful. MYOB Lite caught fire at SGI because of its ease of access and use and was quickly adopted and used by 500-plus marketers and executives. Viaweb, on the other hand, was a commercial success. By the end of 1996, more than 70 stores were online, and by the end of 1997, that number had grown to more than 500. In July 1998, Graham and company sold Viaweb for $50 million in Yahoo! stock, and it became known as Yahoo Stores. He went on to form Y Combinator, a wildly successful technology incubator, out of which has come many great companies including Dropbox and Airbnb.

In addition to their real-world success and the springboard they provided for their inventors, Viaweb and MYOB Lite had one other very important thing in common. The user interface (UI) consisted only of an off-the-shelf Web browser. Paul Graham referred to Viaweb as an application service provider, and John McCaskey's application was simply a light version of a Business Objects implementation, sans Business Objects. In other words, Viaweb and MYOB Lite were two of history's first SaaS applications. SaaS is today's term for applications that do not require any client-side software. The only product needed to run them on the user side is a web browser. Today, there are thousands of SaaS applications. We use them every day – Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, eBay, Match.com, Salesforce.com, and virtually every other software application developed in the past five years. But, in 1995, the concept was revolutionary and initiated a seismic shift in the software industry.