Month: May 1998

“This appeals to people who are looking for a particular site and can’t remember a URL, and for whom the whole approach of typing in ‘www.companyname.com’ doesn’t feel good.”

Abe Hirsch, director of business development for AltaVista, for whom the whole approach of registering “www.altavista.com” never worked, on his company’s new RealName service to make sure fools and their Web sites are not parted, News.com, 6 May 1998

“I’m still out trying to build the Knowledge Navigator, but doing it not with just one company but a whole series of companies.”

Quixotic visionary and erstwhile soda jerk John Sculley, still dreaming the impossible dream of ubiquitous information access through whizzy gadgets, Seattle Times, 5 May 1998

“It’s not really in our model to provide work for hire.”

Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Jeff Mallett, who seems curiously unaware of such operations as the Netscape Guide by Yahoo and MTV UnfURLed, on his company’s standoffish approach to negotiations over renewing Netscape’s search agreements for its Netcenter Web site, TechWeb News, 4 May 1998

“We had the first great wave of visionaries and boosterism, which was exciting and energizing. But now we’ve lived here for a while, and we have a lot of empirical evidence about how it works.”

Feed editor Steven Johnson, on how his skilled hand at manufacturing hype and making oracular pronouncements will come in handy for a new discussion site sponsored by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Wired News, 1 May 1998

“When I started Fray, everyone in the industry was talking about advertising and hourly news updates — all this stuff I already get on TV and radio. They were ignoring what the Web’s really good at, which is connecting people, letting them tell their stories and getting them involved in the experience. You just can’t do that in other media.”

Derek Powazek, freelance Web design guru and creator of the Fray and Kvetch, dissing old media in Tripod Web Tech, 30 April 1998