The W3C is located at MIT, in seven rooms on the third floor of the Laboratory for Computer Science, with a paid staff of approximately a dozen MIT researchers and an annual budget of $3.5 million. (There are also satellite branches at the National Institute for Research in Computer Science, in Rocquencourt, France, and at Keio University, in Tokyo.) The consortium was founded in October 1994, at which point Dertouzos wooed as director Berners-Lee, the shy, self-effacing Englishman who wrote the URL (uniform resource locator), HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), and HTML (hypertext markup language) protocols that have become the lingua franca of the Web. At the time Berners-Lee was a researcher at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), in Geneva. He had grown tired of being bombarded by business executives begging him for specs they could use to shape the Web. He decided to protect the Web's future by moving his efforts to a vendor-neutral environment. The newly formed consortium had little trouble attracting members; the list now reads like a high-tech Who's Who: Netscape, Microsoft, America Online, IBM, Digital Equipment Corp., Sony, AT&T. Most of the 140 corporate members pay annual dues of up to $50,000 for the privilege of belonging to the consortium; smaller companies and nonprofits pay as little as $5,000.
Berners-Lee talks a bold game when it comes to keeping the Web free of single-vendor influence: "Corporate information-technology strategists should think very carefully about committing themselves to using features that will bind them to any one company," he says. "The Web has exploded because it is open. It has developed so rapidly because the creative forces of thousands of companies are building on the same platform. Binding oneself to one company means limiting one's future to the innovations that that company can provide." Consortium public-relations backgrounder sheets are filled with similarly determined statements: "W3C was founded to develop common standards for the evolution of the World Wide Web," reads one, "[and to] provide a reference-code implementation to embody and promote standards."
But the W3C is like a new college graduate with a wealthy and influential family, for whom expectations are high and contacts plentiful, but whose career doesn't seem to get off the ground. The consortium has failed to take control of setting standards for the Web. W3C personnel tend to downplay the failure, claiming that setting standards isn't the consortium's whole mission. "We're an industry consortium that works with its member companies on areas they've approved, one of which happens to be developing standards," says MIT/W3C research scientist Jim Miller. But if the W3C isn't primarily an industry standardssetting organization, it's not because it has other things to do; it's because it's unable to set those standards.
Dertouzos indirectly acknowledges the consortium's lack of results by insisting that the process of trying to set standards is valuable in itself. The W3C offers its members "the opportunity to scream around a table with their competitors," he says. "You know, a great deal gets done that way." However, when you have an explosively growing business to run, in an industry that measures time in Web years--2.6 months per year, according to Berners-Lee--who has time to sit around a table, let alone with rivals?
Certainly not Netscape. You'd never know it, though, from Marc Andreessen, Netscape's cofounder and senior vice-president of technology. "In the networking world, standards are a lot more important than they were in the PC world," he says. "The only way to meet all the requirements for sharing information and for communicating across a huge diversity of systems is through open standards."
And in fact, Netscape has been devoting an increasing amount of resources to the issue of standards. Since its inception, the company has joined at least five computer-related standards bodies and is considering joining four more. Of Netscape's approximately 1,500 employees, director of technology Martin Haeberli estimates that at least 5% are involved with standards bodies--attending meetings, workshops, and conferences, or participating in E-mail discussion groups. Along with the time commitment to those bodies (typical standards discussion groups can generate some 50 E-mail messages a day), Netscape makes a financial commitment. The company won't disclose figures, but in addition to the cost of dues, travel, and development workshops, Netscape recently hired Carl Cargill as its standards strategist, to work full-time on standards issues.
