Entrepreneurs in computing

Much publicity has been given to figures such as Micro-soft founder and multibillionaire Bill Gates, who turned a vest-pocket company selling BASIC language tapes into the dominant seller of operating systems and office software for PCs. Historically, however, the role of key entrepreneurs in the establishment of information technology sectors repeats the achievements of such 19th- and early 20th-century technology pioneers as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. There appear to be certain times when scientific insight and technological capability can be translated into businesses that have the potential to transform society while making the pioneers wealthy.

Like their counterparts in earlier industrial revolu-tions, the entrepreneurs who created the modern computer industry tend to share certain common features. In posi-tive terms one can highlight imagination and vision such as that which enabled J. Presber Eckert and John Mauchly to conceive that the general-purpose electronic computer could find an essential place in the business and scientific world (see Eckert, J. Presper and Mauchly, John). In the software world, observers point to Bill Gates’s intense focus and ability to create and market not just an operat-ing system but also an approach to computing that would transform the office (see Gates, William, III). The Internet revolution, too, was sparked by both an “intellectual entre-preneur” such as Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web (see Berners-Lee, Tim) and by Netscape found-ers Mark Andreessen and Jim Clark, who turned the Web browser into an essential tool for interacting with informa-tion both within and outside of organizations.

While technological innovation is important, the ability to create a “social invention”—such as a new vehicle or plan for doing business, can be equally telling. At the beginning of the 21st century, the World Wide Web, effectively less than a decade old, is seeing the struggle of entrepreneurs such as Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, and Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang to expand significant toeholds in the marketing of products and information into sustainable businesses.

Historically, as industries mature, the pure entrepre-neur tends to give way to the merely effective CEO. In the computer field, however, it is very hard to sort out the waves of innovation that seem to follow close upon one another. Some sectors, such as the selling of computer sys-tems (a sector dominated by entrepreneurs such as Michael Dell [Dell Computers] and Compaq’s Rod Canion) seem to have little remaining scope for innovation. In other sectors, such as operating systems (an area generally dominated by Microsoft), an innovator such as Linus Torvalds (devel-oper of Linux) can suddenly emerge as a viable challenger. And as for the Internet and e-commerce, it is too early to tell whether the pace of innovation has slowed and the shakeout now under way will lead to a relatively stable landscape. (Note: a number of other biographies of com-puter entrepreneurs are featured in this book. For example, see Andreessen, Marc; Bezos, Jeffrey P.; Engelberger, Joseph; Moore, Gordon E.; and Omidyar, Pierre.)