Chapter 103: Text Telephone
Chapter 103: Text Telephone
“But are you really not planning to make it a paid service?”
If someone heard that by 2025 standards, they would probably think charging users for a portal site was ridiculous.
However, that was merely a fixed idea formed through the accumulated experience of that era.
At this point in time, when no one yet had a clear understanding of what portal sites were or what kind of profit model they should have, it was natural for people to first think of similar services — namely, the operating methods of PC communication services.
And in fact, AOL, which could currently be considered the third portal site, did charge usage fees.
(Translator’s Note: AOL — America Online, a major American internet service provider and online services company, especially influential during the 1990s internet boom.)
However, rather than simply charging for portal access, they were also an internet provider, and users accessed the portal through their own proprietary client, so it strongly resembled a PC communication service.
In other words, it was more accurate to view it as an existing PC communication service with internet connectivity added on.
Because of that, many people who previously enjoyed PC communication services used it, so in the early days it had a user base nearly equal to WET’s.
But naturally, paid services could not beat free ones forever, so it was rapidly losing market share.
Insu answered with a bitter smile.
“The reason AOL is falling behind is because it’s paid. I’m going to keep everything free in the future too, and instead generate profit through advertisements and other additional services. For now, we need to endure things and raise our market share as much as possible.”
“That’s true. If we started charging money, more than half the users would probably leave.”
In truth, it was not as if Seongcheol did not understand this. AOL probably understood it too.
But as the internet rapidly expanded, the costs of operating WET were increasing exponentially while profits could not keep up, so he had spoken out of impatience.
Insu then connected to the chat room.
Originally, they had considered simply embedding IRC directly, but unless someone was interested in that sort of thing, even that could be complicated for the majority of ordinary people who were only just beginning to enter the internet. There were also many opinions that it would be difficult to manage and did not suit a portal service.
(Translator’s Note: IRC — Internet Relay Chat, a real-world text-based online chat protocol created in 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen in Finland. IRC became one of the earliest widely used systems for real-time online group chat and internet communities.)
Problems like profanity, pornography, and the circulation of illegal information could arise, and since they had only just begun the business and were still building users and their image, they would have difficulty handling those kinds of incidents if they occurred.
So in the end, they simplified IRC by removing some functions and implemented it as a permanently open feature under the community boards.
This made monitoring and management relatively easier.
[Anyone want to play multiplayer together?!]
[How old are you? Are you a girl?]
[20s guy living in LA looking for female friends to hang out with!]
[Anyone want to duel me 1-on-1?]
[Me! Make a room!]
[DieDieDieDieDieDie]
The chat room was noisy.
There did not seem to be much meaningful conversation, but chat rooms were originally like this.
After confirming that much, Insu left his seat.
For now, the users seemed to be enjoying it enthusiastically.
That was enough.
In any case, this chat room service existed purely as content meant to keep users around. It was not some system they had enormous expectations for.
In the end, it’s a service that disappears.
During the early days of online services, it was an extremely fascinating feature, but as technology developed and various new services appeared, it gradually began to be replaced and lose its share of the market, before eventually being completely replaced by mobile messengers.
Messengers, huh...
Mobile messengers were still a rather distant story, but PC messengers had been an idea he had considered for quite a while.
Until now, he had been busy developing games, and the environment had not matured enough for it to have meaning even if he made one, so he had left it alone. But now it felt like the timing to finally attempt it was slowly approaching.
However, they currently lacked the manpower to develop it.
The game development team was busy with TLF Online’s development, and the WET Business Team was also overwhelmed developing the search engine.
Apparently, they had already implemented the indexing system and search algorithm, but they were now designing the storage system, so finishing the front end UI and test debugging would still take at least three months, or four to five months at most.
They would barely manage to release it within 1995.
That’s cutting it close.
Some people might think it was still only 1995, but in the world of his previous life, AltaVista had already launched a crawling-based search engine service in 1995.
No, even now, several crawler bots already existed.
However, because implementation details were still lacking, there were many performance problems. Some search engines only searched webpage titles and headers, others focused purely on keywords, and some lacked proper indexing functionality, causing search results to lack detail.
Ironically, the directory-based search engine currently used by WET actually produced better search results.
However, there was not much time left where it could maintain that performance.
This directory-based search engine relied entirely on manually finding and organizing information, but recently the total number of webpages on the internet had begun exploding at an incredible pace.
Last year, the number had clearly been around two thousand. By April this year, it had become ten thousand, which was already a fivefold increase.
But now, only three months later, it had surpassed twenty-three thousand.
Fortunately, there were still huge numbers of personal pages and dummy pages with no meaningful informational value, so the quality of search results had not yet declined too severely.
However, the speed of collecting and organizing information had already fallen behind the speed at which webpages were increasing.
Of course, they might somehow keep up if they hired more people, but anyone could tell the growth rate was increasing exponentially. Responding that way would merely be a shortsighted temporary fix.
If we’re going to do that, it’d be better to assign more people to developing the search engine instead.
That was why his original plan had been to write the messenger proposal and rough design documents himself, then wait.
After all, messengers were services that only truly began flourishing in the late 1990s, so there was still some room.
Of course, the very first messengers might have appeared somewhat earlier, but they could not increase the number of development teams for every single idea just to claim the title of “the first.”
For now, even if they increased the number of development teams by a few, they could still handle it.
But in the future, IT labor costs would rise rapidly, and there was no guarantee that the games currently serving as their source of funds would continue generating income forever.
Moreover, while they were confidently challenging the MMORPG market, whether it would actually succeed could only be known when the time came.
And I’m not even sure it’ll generate major profits from the start.
They were proceeding under the plan of completing development and launching the service as quickly as possible to maximize first-mover advantage and imprinting effects, but early pioneers always suffered because the market itself was not yet fully prepared.
In the cases of Kingdom of the Winds and Lineage, people only remembered the massive legends they built later. In the beginning, they barely had around a thousand users.
Still, Kingdom of the Winds launched in 1996 and Lineage in 1998, so they did not have to wait that long before the boom arrived.
But right now, it was only 1995.
Of course, Insu had calculations of his own.
This was America, where internet adoption had begun far faster than in Korea. Furthermore, its economic power was much stronger, so he judged that even with a relatively small percentage of early users, they could at least sustain operations.
In any case, because uncertainties like these existed, they needed to be cautious when spending money.
It’d really be convenient if we could just acquire something developed by an individual or small company.
The IT bubble had not fully expanded yet, so even if such projects existed, the prices probably would not be absurd.
Still, things in the world were rarely that convenient.
To begin with, anyone capable of developing a messenger would likely already have their own judgment regarding its value and potential. There was no way they would suddenly sell it off cheaply.
After returning to the development room, Insu checked the development status once before continuing his thoughts.
But after thinking about it further, even if the WET development team completed the search engine, it still seemed unlikely they would have enough room to develop a messenger.
They were not an outsourced development team but a “business team,” meaning they would also have to respond to issues arising from actual live service operations. Even after the engine, they would still need to develop additional content.
An email service was already being prepared right now.
In AOL’s case, because it was a paid service, they had already launched email without much burden, and there were rumors that EverNest was also preparing one. To respond to that, WET also needed to launch email.
Since they’ll probably keep developing all sorts of things anyway, should we just expand the development team a little more?
There were still the concerns he had mentioned earlier, but business was fundamentally about taking risks.
If you believed you could gain more than the risk, then you pushed forward.
Come to think of it, there was another thing they would need to develop before long.
Well, it’s not like I’m alone. Mom and Dad are here too, so we should be able to manage one more development team.
In the past, he used to think that as long as he had enough money, he could create endless development teams and make all kinds of things.
But now he understood how difficult it really was to make people work properly just by paying them.
Even with simple labor, there were quite a few people who only pretended to work while wasting time — so-called salary thieves.
And work like development, which required creativity and motivation, was truly difficult to manage.
Of course, since people were being paid and employed, it was rare for someone to completely stop working altogether.
That would be genuinely insane. At that point, you could just fire them.
However, continuously working and working in a way that actually achieved goals were completely different matters.
If time and money were infinite, more people than expected could probably achieve their goals.
But this was reality.
To overcome realistic barriers and limitations and still achieve goals required something called leadership.
Fortunately, through developing games until now, Insu had confirmed that he possessed enough capability to lead a single team and create games.
However, whether he could lead multiple teams was another matter entirely, and that kind of ability was quite rare.
So hiring a new team and proceeding with another project might also become a test of the management capabilities of himself and his family.
And messenger development was a project perfectly suited for such an experiment.
It did not require many people, and neither the development difficulty nor workload was especially large, so even if it failed, the damage would not be severe.
Around four or five people for roughly five months should do it, right?
In reality, ICQ, which could be considered the world’s first commercial instant messenger in his previous life, had been completed in just three months by four developers.
Of course, that was only the basic form, and they would need to add more features afterward, so it would not truly end after only five months.
But what mattered was that the time required to determine whether the project succeeded or failed was short.
After thinking for a long time, Insu sent the team members home and then went upstairs to see his parents.
“A new project?”
“Yes. I’m thinking about developing a program that allows people to exchange messages instantly.”
Seongcheol was surprised by his son’s enthusiasm, but he seriously considered the idea.
“But is a program like that really necessary? PC communication services already have private message functions, don’t they? There are also chat services, and on top of that, we’re planning to launch email soon. Is there really a need for a dedicated messaging program?”
By 2025, after PC messengers and then mobile messengers achieved enormous success, people used them so naturally that they no longer questioned their necessity.
But this era was different.
And part of the reason was that the infrastructure allowing messengers to fully demonstrate their efficiency did not yet exist.
For one thing, multitasking — running several programs at once — was still limited.
Even in his previous life, proper multitasking support only truly arrived after Windows 95. This world was still only around the level of Windows 3.1.