Joe in the accounting department would get on his office PC and try to get the latest sales numbers for 1995, but he couldn't do that because the sales department was on a different system from the one accounting was using. It was as if one was speaking German and the other French. And then Joe would say, “Get me the latest shipment information from Goodyear on what tires they have sent us,” and he would find that Goodyear was using a different system altogether, and the dealer in Topeka was running yet another system. Then Joe would go home and find his seventh-grader on the World Wide Web researching a term paper, using open protocols, and looking at the holdings of some art museum in France. And Joe would say, “This is crazy. There has to be one totally interconnected network.”
In the years before the Internet became commercial, explained Andreessen, scientists developed a series of “open protocols” meant to make everyone's e-mail system or university computer network connect seamlessly with everyone else's-to ensure that no one had some special advantage. These mathematical-based protocols, which enable digital devices to talk to each other, were like magical pipes that, once you adopted them for your network, made you compatible with everyone else, no matter what kind of computer they were running. These protocols were (and still are) known by their alphabet soup names: mainly FTP, HTTP, SSL, SMTP, POP, and TCP/IP. Together, they form a system for transporting data around the Internet in a relatively secure manner, no matter what network your company or household has or what computer or cell phone or handheld device you are using. Each protocol had a different function: TCP/IP was the basic plumbing of the Internet, or the basic railroad tracks, on which everything else above it was built and moved around. FTP moved files; SMTP and POP moved e-mail messages, which became standardized, so that they could be written and read on different e-mail systems. HTML was a language that allowed even ordinary people to author Web pages that anyone with a Web browser could display. But it was the introduction of HTTP to move HTML documents around that gave birth to the World Wide Web as we know it. Finally, as people began to use these Web pages for electronic commerce, SSL was created to provide security for Web-based transactions.
As browsing and the Internet in general grew, Netscape wanted to make sure that Microsoft, with its huge market dominance, would not be able to shift these Web protocols from open to proprietary standards that only Microsoft's servers would be able to handle. “Netscape helped to guarantee that these open protocols would not be proprietary by commercializing them for the public,” said Andreessen. “Netscape came along not only with the browser but with a family of software products that implemented all these open standards so that the scientists could communicate with each other no matter what system they were on-a Cray supercomputer, a Macintosh, or a PC. Netscape was able to provide a real reason for everyone to say, 'I want to be on open standards for everything I do and for all the systems I work on.' Once we created a way to browse the Internet, people wanted a universal way to access what was out there. So anyone who wanted to work on open standards went to Netscape, where we supported them, or they went to the open-source world and got the same standards for free but unsupported, or they went to their private vendors and said, 'I am not going to buy your proprietary stuff anymore... I am not going to sign up to your walled garden anymore. I am only going to stay with you if you interconnect to the Internet with these open protocols.'”
Netscape began pushing these open standards through the sale of its browsers, and the public responded enthusiastically. Sun started to do the same with its servers, and Microsoft started to do the same with Windows 95, considering browsing so critical that it famously built its own browser directly into Windows with the addition of Internet Explorer. Each realized that the public, which suddenly could not get enough of e-mail and browsing, wanted the Internet companies to work together and create one interoperable network. They wanted companies to compete with each other over different applications, that is, over what consumers could do once they were on the Internet-not over how they got on the Internet in the first place. As a result, after quite a few “format wars” among the big companies, by the late 1990s the Internet computing platform became seamlessly integrated. Soon anyone was able to connect with anyone else anywhere on any machine. It turned out that the value of compatibility was much higher for everyone than the value of trying to maintain your own little walled network. This integration was a huge flattener, because it enabled so many more people to get connected with so many more other people.