How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network (The Kauffman Foundation Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship)

by Shane Greenstein

Unrestricted markets supported technological competition between distinct perceptions. The history of the Internet contains several crucial moments when competition between organizations with distinct perceptions supported distinct approaches to creating market value. As described in chapters 2 and 3, in the early 1990s PSINet and UUNET were entrepreneurs with a distinct viewpoint about how the Internet would create value, and they invested more aggressively in the data-carrier business than many established firms. In the middle of the 1990s, as chapters 4 and 7 stressed, Microsoft failed to make aggressive investments in supporting web technology, and Netscape, a start-up with a distinct viewpoint about how to create value, challenged it by trying to grow the browser-based market for new applications.