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So what do Netscape, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Spyglass, RSA, Yahoo!, Firefly Network, Art Technology Group, and even Inktomi - whose technology drives HotBot - have in common?
Well, yes, they are all successful Internet-related companies or products. But for the purposes of this column, that's not what makes them so intriguing. Each of these companies is - unashamedly and unambiguously - a direct spinoff from the groves of academe. At the core of each of these ventures is a great idea and human capital spawned directly from academic - not business - experience.
In other words, we aren't talking about refugees from Apple, IBM, HP, and/or Oracle, although all those companies have their own rich, idiosyncratic tradition of entrepreneurial castoffs. What we're seeing are intellectual overachievers whose ambitions went way beyond "publish or perish" to "let's turn our intellectual capital into financial capital - fast." Universities have been drivers of both technical and commercial innovation on the Net.
Which raises some very provocative challenges for the future of the Web. Perhaps more than a few of you are familiar with the trademark furor that raged between the University of Illinois and Mosaic Communications - then subsequently Netscape Communications - in the early days of the Jim Clark/Mark Andreessen collaboration. Ugly, ugly, ugly.... But Spyglass, the official U of I browser company, didn't do so badly either. Companies like Cisco and Sun have grown well beyond their academic roots, yet they retain an aggressive intellectual curiosity about innovation that reflects their origins. There's a reason why Java came out of Sun and not IBM, Oracle, or Apple. Similarly, there's a reason why Cisco could so quickly recognize and snap up a company like Granite Systems - which built its business on Gigabit Ethernet switching technology. (Granite was founded, not so coincidentally, by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.)
This academy-soaked culture of innovation has enormous implications for the future of the Web. Let's take the first and most obvious: There is now no longer any meaningful distinction between academic research in computer science and commercial implication. A Stanford PhD thesis in Java instantaneously becomes the seedling for a start-up; a Carnegie Mellon math major who comes up with a nifty encryption algorithm probably retains a patent attorney; an MIT undergraduate who figures out how to cache and compress GIFs in a clever way will have no problems getting someone to fund a commercial version of her breakthrough.
Oh, and by the way, do we think that professors of computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and other computationally intensive science and engineering curricula don't see the gold rush that the Web has become? Does anybody doubt that many graduate students will be encouraged to consider the commercial implications of the thesis topics they select?
The emerging reality is that every major research university in the world that is on the Internet is inherently in the Internet business. It's unavoidable, it's inevitable, and it's going to change the way universities fund themselves, train their students, and relate to the outside world. Precisely because the phenomenon of "Internet time" transforms the rate at which innovations sweep through the Web, the lag time from thesis topic to new venture is going to shrink from years to months to weeks.
Prediction: Before the end of this year, we will hear of or see a major venture-capital fund give money to a doctoral candidate in either CS or mathematics, based on a thesis proposal (let alone a finished dissertation).
Indeed, Sun chief scientist John Gage - who emphatically agrees that this column's thesis has disconcerting merit - observed that Bill Joy actually committed to reading every related doctoral thesis published in America over the preceding five years in the process of making his contributions to Java's development. Gage believes that companies like Sun whose futures are committed to Inter- and intranets have no choice but to strike closer relations with academe.
It used to be the challenge was hiring the best and the brightest students; now the challenge has shifted to identifying who they are even as they embark on obtaining their degrees.
Does that mean the Caltechs, MITs, Carnegie Mellons, and University of Illinois will become equity holders in tomorrow's Internet innovators? Don't bet against it. Does that mean we'll be seeing all kinds of competition between Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, IBM, Netscape, the US$100 million Java Fund, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for cutting deals with Net-sophisticated universities? Absolutely.
There has never been a better time to be a truly clever CS or mathematics student. And that means there has never been a better time to be an intellectual-property lawyer....
