In fact, the World Wide Web itself benefited from the network effect. When Tim Berners-Lee first developed the web in 1989, there were several contenders for methods of storing information on the internet, like Gopher and WAIS. There were also commercial products like GEnie, CompuServe and Delphi. In 1994, Microsoft even targeted the market with its own offering, Microsoft Network. But Berners-Lee’s web became not just dominant but the sole viable information network on the internet, because of network externalities – once a lot of people were there, everyone else had to congregate there too.
