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Founders at Work.pdf

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268 <strong>Founders</strong> <strong>at</strong> <strong>Work</strong><br />

them locally within CERN in Switzerland. We were doing them within a corpor<strong>at</strong>e<br />

environment using supercomputers and the Internet as well.<br />

Livingston: So Dow Jones, KPMG Pe<strong>at</strong> Marwick, and Apple were all involved?<br />

Kahle: Yes, everybody was working together. It was a project th<strong>at</strong> had a project<br />

team in each the companies, and I ran it. I moved out to the West Coast to try<br />

and run it, because I knew I could run Thinking Machines remotely, but I<br />

didn’t think I could run Apple remotely. So I moved out to the West Coast and<br />

had a cubicle and a project team th<strong>at</strong> I worked with <strong>at</strong> Apple.<br />

Livingston: Tell me about some of the hard technical problems th<strong>at</strong> WAIS<br />

addressed.<br />

Kahle: One of the difficult things was just using the computer networks <strong>at</strong> the<br />

time. This is 1989, and the Internet hadn’t quite become easy in any real sense.<br />

Trying to hook up to Dow Jones through X.25 networks and ISDN was all quite<br />

challenging. KPMG Pe<strong>at</strong> Marwick started to have an intranet then th<strong>at</strong> we<br />

could use, and fortun<strong>at</strong>ely they used Macintoshes. The Macintoshes were helpful<br />

because they had TCP/IP for them, where Windows didn’t. It wasn’t until<br />

Windows 95 came out 6 years l<strong>at</strong>er th<strong>at</strong> Microsoft caught up.<br />

Wh<strong>at</strong> I loved about it was I got to work with four companies th<strong>at</strong> were managed<br />

very differently from each other. This was my b<strong>at</strong>h of “How do companies<br />

work?” Thinking Machines was a bottom-up company. In many ways, the ideas<br />

and the people with power were the young engineers. They could see where<br />

things were going better than the top level management, because everything<br />

was so new.<br />

Dow Jones was a top-down company. If you sold the top guy, he’d say, “OK,<br />

we’re going to do this.” Then he’d issue a command, and the next-level guy<br />

would say, “OK, sir, I’m going to do this.”<br />

Apple Computer was explained to me to be a “beanbag chair.” You had to<br />

push not only on the top, but on the bottom and the middle all <strong>at</strong> the same time<br />

to try to get it to move. This was a time when John Sculley was running Apple,<br />

and I don’t know if it’s any different now, but <strong>at</strong> th<strong>at</strong> time you had to actually<br />

keep pushing all up and down the whole chain or it just wouldn’t move. You’d<br />

push, and you’d think you were making headway, but the beanbag chair didn’t<br />

move.<br />

KPMG Pe<strong>at</strong> Marwick was a democracy. It’s a partnership. Each partner<br />

thought of themselves as in control of their piece of turf. And they were very<br />

much so. They controlled their own revenue; they spent it; it was a democracy.<br />

In fact, every so often they would get together and elect their upper-layer management.<br />

If they didn’t like the upper-layer management—which was just<br />

another consulting office, like any other—they’d vote them out. And they did.<br />

The folks th<strong>at</strong> were really supporting the WAIS project <strong>at</strong> KPMG Pe<strong>at</strong> Marwick<br />

after a couple years got more or less voted out. Not because of WAIS, but the<br />

partners said, “We want a different type of management.”

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