Hi, I'm "jerickson.com, an Internet company," and, like other Internet Wunderkinder, I'm going public. Sure, I've never made a profit. So what. That doesn't stop me from pocketing sucker money -- and, if Wall Street is a gauge, big bucks are there for the taking.
Putting all seriousness aside, for me the height of the Internet stock lunacy was Prodigy's initial public offering. Here's an 11-year-old company that's gone through at least $4 billion in funding, and never made a penny. But within 24 hours of its IPO, Prodigy stocks had doubled from $15 to $30 a share. What a concept. Then there's Amazon.com, the online bookseller that encourages authors to review their own books and conduct interviews with themselves. According to Business Week (December 14, 1998), Amazon.com needs a growth rate of almost 60 percent per year for the next 10 years to justify its December $214 per share price. For this to happen, Amazon.com has to have annual sales of $63 billion. However, as Business Week's Jeffrey Laderman noted, U.S. retail book sales in 1997 only totaled $11.8 billion, with relatively flat growth projections. By way of comparison, Microsoft's annual growth over the last 13 years has averaged 43 percent.
To increase revenues, Amazon.com has branched out into music and video, neither of which is a market much bigger than books. And to further justify its stock price, money-losing Amazon.com has invested in money-losing Drugstore.com. Selling toothpaste and shampoo over the Internet. Now there's a concept.
Speaking of which, if you are not a subscriber to DDJ, stop reading now! Oh, I'm just kidding -- but Sun Microsystems isn't, at least when it comes to its Java 2 source code (see http://www.sun .com/software/communitysource/java2/). According to Sun's Java 2 license, licensees can use and modify the source code for commercial software development without charge. Good. Licensees can change the source code without returning the innovation to Sun. Okay. Finally, licensees can share source code and modifications only with other licensees. Huh? Does this mean that you can modify the source code, but can't post it on your web site for peer review? Sounds like it, unless you add a warning like "Achtung! Halt! Verboten!" Ditto if you want to write a book or magazine article, present a conference paper, or otherwise share hard-won information with fellow programmers. Although counter to the accepted concept of "open source," Sun believes this approach does, in fact, incorporate "the best of the Open Source model."
Upon reading the Sun press release (which, as a member of the press, I was allowed to do), I asked a spokesperson what the policy is regarding books, articles, and papers read by nonlicensees. She said they'd be back in touch real soon. Alas, I'm still waiting.
As unclear as Sun is on the concept, it doesn't hold a candle to 3Com/Palm Computing's source-code license for the Palm OS (http://www.palm.com/devzone/rom3/srclicense.pdf). For one thing, all suggestions for improvement belong to Palm. Also, the license only gives you the right to "reproduce and display" copies of the source code at the "[street] address at which Licensee has registered." You can't "copy, duplicate, or otherwise reproduce" portions of the source code and send snippets of it to another person via e-mail, let alone put it on a laptop and study it on the train. In short, Palm's license treats the source code as read-only documentation. Now, this isn't all bad; a lot of jobs would be easier if, say, Microsoft did the same with Windows 98. However, Palm's implying that its code is "open source" is like Sam Goldwyn saying a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on. Clearly not clear on the concept.
Internet companies aside, an up and coming concept is home networks. What with the availability of cheap PCs, 15 to 20 million U.S. homes now have two or more computers, according to Dataquest. Consequently, multiple-PC households want to share files, assorted peripherals, and (eventually) Internet access. Currently, says IDC, 1.9 million U.S. homes have networks, growing to 12 million homes in a few years. Today's $200 million in home-networking sales are expected to be $1 billion in five years.
Several companies, mostly on the cabling and hardware side, are gearing up for home networking -- 3Com, ShareWave, Phillips Electronics, Epigram, Proxim, ActionTec, and Tut Systems, among others. Some are providing wireless solutions, others are using phone and electrical lines, still others are using standard network cables. And, surprise, there's even an industry trade group -- the Home Phone Networking Alliance (http://www.homepna.org/).
It's nice to share printers and files, but the problem is the paucity of important stuff -- network games. So, with all the focus on Internet-aware development, take a look at opportunities in the network-enabled home software market. It may be a concept whose time has come. In the meantime, keep your eyes open for my IPO, which should pop up any day now at Charles Schwab's web site at http://w -- oops, the site just went down again; third time this month by my count. Looks like I'm having better luck at becoming an Internet company than Charles Schwab.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com