ETC: Bill Joy's Six Webs - Technology Review

ETC: Bill Joy's Six Webs

Bill Joy, the inventor of Berkeley Unix, the founder of Sun Microsystems, and now a partner at Kleiner Perkins, that most blue-blooded of venture capital firms, is describing a taxonomy for the Internet. He calls it "the six Webs." I...

Jason Pontin 09/29/2005

6 Comments

Bill Joy, the inventor of Berkeley Unix, the founder of Sun Microsystems, and now a partner at Kleiner Perkins, that most blue-blooded of venture capital firms, is describing a taxonomy for the Internet. He calls it "the six Webs." I have heard him give this speech before - most distantly at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1999. I am a little surprised that he's still delivering the lecture - but his ideas are not uninteresting, and are worth noting.

Bill Joy's six Webs are:

1. The Near Web: This is the Internet that you see when you lean over a screen - like a laptop.
2. The Here Web. This is the Internet that is always with you because you accesses it through a device you always carry - like a cell phone.
3. The Far Web. This is the Internet you see when you sit back from a big screen - like a television or a kiosk.
4. The Weird Web. This is the Internet you access through your voice and which you listen to - say when you are in your car, or when you talk to an intelligent system on your phone, or when you ask your camera a question. Joy concedes that this Web does not yet fully exist.
5. B2B. This is an Internet which does not possess a consumer interface, where business machines talk to other business machines. It is chatter of corporations amongst themselves when they do not care about their human drones.
6. D2D. This is the Internet of sensors deployed in meshes networks, adjusting urban systems for maximum efficiency. This Web also does not yet exist. Joy says that it will embed machine intelligence in ordinary, daily life.

Joy concludes by saying that, of all six Webs, number 2 - "the Here Web" - is by far the most interesting and productive of new innovations.

Incidentally, in person, Bill Joy's affect is remarkably like Jeff Goldblum's performance of Seth Brundel in The Fly.

TED Day 1: Bono Heckles the Stage ETC: Mike Moritz is Worried about the US

Guest (Somkiran)

2291 Days Ago
11/06/2005

It is really interesting to note six different forms of web. But, does the web squeeze, accomodate, react and act when humans log in or log out?
Web needs to become like the jelly in a jar that accomodates a steel ball when somebody puts in it.
Could this be achieved by different forms of the web?

Guest (Somkiran)

2291 Days Ago
11/06/2005

It is really interesting to note six different forms of web. But, does the web squeeze, accomodate, react and act when humans log in or log out?
Web needs to become like the jelly in a jar that accomodates a steel ball when somebody puts in it.
Could this be achieved by different forms of the web?

Guest (Gary Delooze)

2211 Days Ago
01/25/2006

I've heard better ways of describing channels or interactions models...

What IS interesting in Bill's description is that he links user interaction (1-4) and user-independent machine or device interaction (5-6). Personally I am more interested in these modes of interaction (and others, such as device-to-business) than I am in the mechanisms for rendering the interactions based on the device.

Oh, and of all, I can see a state in the future when D2D, D2B and B2B generate more traffic than that which we generate. Perhaps we need to think now about how this will work, before device generated spam takes over the net....

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2035 Days Ago
07/20/2006

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2027 Days Ago
07/28/2006

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1 Comment

468 Days Ago
11/03/2010

BillJoy-My Experience Juliet S/Y Just another WordPress.com site Skip to contentHomeAboutBill Joy So Called UNIX Risk Taker a Myth
Posted on November 3, 2010 by pazzaglini
My Experience with Bill Joy the Whimp

Recently I had an experience with legendary BSD developer Bill Joy. I was not impressed at all! Now I understand why SunMicro Systems and UNIX failed as a dominate player in today’s IT world. It all started with a sail boat he owns and docks in New Zealand. He acquired the yacht in the early 90’s and named it Juliet. It was his first real yacht he owned and one that he was going to impress his friends from Microsoft with and show that a UNIX guy could also own a large yacht too. This whole story about who has the largest yacht doesn’t stop, it goes on and on and on. I have owned and chartered some of the largest yachts in the world and believe me it is boring! No one to talk to and the very friends you thought you were going to impress snub you and you never get the satisfaction out of it. So it turns into a so called hobby that you only use to buy something with and never enjoy it. Ok, back to the story about Bill Joy and my unimpressed impression of this so called UNIX Hero.

I have been in technology since 1977 and have rode the wave the whole way through. I have made a lot of money and spent a lot of money . I am still an entrepreneur at heart and in 2009 I decided to go after a very new niche market in Phase Array Marine Satellite Communications. I had been working on fixed mobile VSAT systems for 5 years supporting Florida and the upper panhandle after Katrina for the Government and am very experienced in satellite communications. I had been researching Phased Array technology for several years and decided that is the next market in mobile VSAT for communications on the move including Maritime. So I launched a new innovative product called ZipPhaser in 2008 and directed it at the cruise ship and super yacht market for high end broadband at sea. We had a booth at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show and hired expert captains to get us into the market. In 2010 around July I received an email from the captain on the Sailing Yacht Juliet, his name is Jonathan. He said the owner of the Juliet wants to put the ZipPhaser on the Juliet because it is so innovative. He also said that the owner was a very high technology guy and had to have it. He didn’t mention any names at that point and I had no idea who owned the Juliet. So I sent Jonathan all the information on our system. After our original correspondence I checked to see who owned the Juliet. Guess who? Bill Joy, and he was also in the process of building another yacht larger than the Juliet to obviously keep up with his competitive friends.

The next step in the sales cycle was interesting to say the least. We went back and forth with captain Jonathan for four months. We had a promotion going on and offered to extend it for Juliet because the promo was going to end in October and they wanted it installed in January. So we did and they were going to get the most competitive price and buy two antennas. The reason they were going to buy two was, you guessed it, Bill Joy. He wanted one antenna on each side of the boom so he would never lose connection when the yacht changed tack. We spent hours working on Bill Joy’s idea of how he wanted it installed on Juliet. We had conference calls between NC and New Zealand with his consultant and everyone in between. Now you have to realize this is a guy who says he got rich on a new operating system called BSD UNIX and took the risk on making it work and took the risk in technology at the early stages of Microsoft with SunMicro Systems.

After I had spent all this time developing a custom installation on Juliet and pricing it at a cost to get this done. Bill Joy has the nerve to say: “ This is not proven technology and I am going to wait for someone else to try it first”. What a Whimp! He in my dealings with him is the guy who portrays himself to be an innovator. I was also around in those early years of UNIX and I did take the chances on technology and I am still doing it today. Not because of the money, because it is in my blood and that is how I think and am driven by it. I will move this technology to the forefront and it won’t be with people like Bill Joy who in my opinion is really a whimp!

Paul Pazzaglini
President
P&L International, Inc.

Phone: 704.843.4991

www.pliinc.com

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Bill Joy Unix founder BSD Juliet ZipPhaser | Leave a comment

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