The Blog That Shook Silicon Valley
Mark Andreessen had logged into Nextcom more out of boredom than anything else, treating it as part of his work routine and keeping his mental defenses firmly in place. It wasn’t entirely inaccurate. As a co-founder of a venture-backed startup that had made its way into Silicon Valley, his business was naturally internet-related. When running an internet company, checking Nextcom was simply unavoidable—an unchanging part of the job. The real danger, of course, was that once you entered Nextcom, you often lost track of your original purpose and wasted hours on unrelated distractions.
“Huh? PowerBlog.com?”
This time, however, something felt different. Mark Andreessen, who visited Nextcom several times a day, immediately noticed the change in the central advertisement. Just an hour earlier, the space had been occupied by a Warcraft ad. Now, an unfamiliar site banner had taken its place.
“Whoever that is must have spent some serious money.”
Internet advertising had reached a level that could no longer be ignored. Nextcom had surpassed fifty million daily visitors early this year, and rumors now suggested the number had climbed past one hundred million. It was a staggering figure—one that would have been unthinkable just a year ago. Yet subscriber numbers kept exploding, and total registered users had already reached tens of millions. Even if each member logged in only twice a day, daily page views easily exceeded one hundred million. With people like Mark himself constantly refreshing the site, the one-hundred-million-view milestone was clearly real.
The central advertisement slot on Nextcom, visited by so many users, commanded the highest rates of any website in the world. According to what he had heard, contracts were sold by the hour, starting at ten thousand dollars. That was the price for the weakest early-morning slots; prime-time evening hours carried two- or three-times premiums. It was currently seven in the evening—the most expensive window. For a brand-new site to secure that golden-time slot meant someone had serious capital behind them.
“Hmm? None of my community friends mentioned launching this. Maybe some well-funded newcomer?”
Those who had come to Silicon Valley dreaming of becoming the next Yoo Jae-won or the next ID Group maintained their own tight-knit networks. University communities and internet forums where IT professionals gathered served as their main channels. At least half of them were Stanford alumni, and because they worked in the same industry, they constantly exchanged information and strengthened their community ties. Mark Andreessen had always been active in these Silicon Valley circles, and he prided himself on knowing exactly who was arriving and who was quietly failing and leaving.
Yet PowerBlog.com was a site that had never once been mentioned in any of his communities.
“Might as well check it out.”
Without hesitation, Mark clicked the advertisement. His web browser redirected to PowerBlog.com and began loading data. The screen flashed white, then letters began raining down from the top of the browser window, quickly forming a single sentence.
“Huh? This site is optimized for HTML 2.0. Please download the latest beta version of the ID Web Browser and try again.”
A prominent download button appeared beneath the message.
“What the hell is this?”
Mark Andreessen was genuinely startled. He had never seen letters cascade like rain before locking into place one by one to form a sentence. “Is it a GIF file?”
Surprisingly, it was not. When he selected the text with his mouse, each individual letter could be highlighted separately. The data type was text, not an image.
“Unbelievable.”
Curious about how the effect had been implemented, Mark wanted to inspect the site’s HTML code. But an even stronger curiosity had already taken hold: the mention of the latest beta version of the ID Web Browser. His own company, Mosaic, was the developer of the world’s most powerful web browser—Netscape. Mark and his co-founder, along with roughly ten programmers and designers, were working to surpass the ID Web Browser. In terms of functionality, he believed they had already succeeded. Compared to the ID Web Browser, which offered only the most basic features, Netscape provided superior convenience and performance. The insurmountable problem was brand recognition—an invisible fourth-dimensional wall.
What infuriated Mark most was the default installation policy. When users installed the Android operating system and clicked the internet icon, the first screen that appeared was a browser-selection menu. Icons for the ID Web Browser, Netscape, Opera, and others were displayed, and the user simply chose one. The catch was that selecting the ID Web Browser launched the internet immediately, while choosing any other browser required downloading and installing it first. The official reason given was insufficient storage space on the installation media, which was why third-party browsers like Netscape were not pre-installed. Because the process was more cumbersome, most users simply chose the ID Web Browser.
Even more frustrating was the legal consultation. When Mark had considered suing over the default placement of the ID Web Browser, his lawyers explained that because a selection menu appeared on first launch, it was difficult to argue that consumer choice was being ignored. They also noted that the policy would change significantly with Android 95. Third-party browsers would be included in the installation media. Future versions would ship only on CD, and with increased storage capacity, other browsers would be pre-installed as well. That news was not good for Mark. Since it was impossible to include every browser on the market, the company planned to include only the top five by market share. As the newest entrant, Netscape hovered below five percent and was barely clinging to fifth place. The gap between fifth and sixth was enormous, so browser makers who had once formed a united front against Android were now eyeing each other warily. Raising market share had become the immediate priority.
In this climate, the announcement of a new ID Web Browser beta was enough to make Mark Andreessen start the download. He hated to admit it, but the ID Web Browser consistently demonstrated the highest technical capability and trend awareness. Checking its latest beta was simply standard industry practice, and Mark was no exception.
A short while later—
“Whoa! What is this?!”
After installing the ID Web Browser beta and revisiting PowerBlog.com, Mark Andreessen could not contain his shock.
“Hey, Jim! Get on Nextcom right now.”
Still reeling, Mark called out to his colleague on the other side of the partition.
“Jim! Jim! Mr. Clark!”
When there was no response, he resorted to using the man’s last name. Still nothing. Mark finally stood up. Jim Clark, Mosaic’s co-founder, was wearing headphones and staring intently at lines of source code on his monitor. After years of working together, Mark could tell at a glance that Jim was in deep focus and at his peak productivity. Normally, the best approach was to leave him alone, but this was an emergency.
“Jim! We’re finished! We’re done for!”
Mark shook Jim Clark’s shoulder and shouted his name.
“Whoa! What’s going on? Can’t you see I’m finally concentrating for the first time in ages?”
As expected, Jim Clark erupted the moment his focus broke. His face flushed red with genuine anger. For the past few days he had been wrestling with several stubborn problems, and today he had finally begun solving them. Having that progress interrupted was understandably infuriating.
“We’re finished. Debugging is the least of our worries right now.”
“What the hell happened?”
“PowerBlog.com.”
“PowerBlog? What kind of site name is that? Did some middle-school kid throw it together?”
“Yoo Jae-won. It’s the blog site Yoo Jae-won of ID Group just launched. Go check it out. Then you’ll understand exactly how I feel.”
Having said his piece, Mark spun back to his desk. Jim Clark shook his head. Mark had always been hot-tempered, but today’s reaction was extreme. Still, when it came to work, Mark was usually reliable. Something about Yoo Jae-won’s PowerBlog.com must have been extraordinary. The name sounded childish to Jim, yet it was memorable and easy to type—an advantage.
Though he regretted losing his productive flow, Mark’s over-the-top reaction made him curious. What could possibly provoke such a response?
A moment later—
“What the—?!”
Jim Clark’s reaction was identical to Mark’s. If anyone wanted to see what “Is this even possible?!” looked like on a human face, they only needed to glance at Jim Clark frozen like a statue in front of his monitor. The shock he felt upon entering PowerBlog.com was that profound.
The internet was abuzz with talk of PowerBlog.com. Given the diverse personalities of netizens, the range of opinions was remarkably wide. Some were moved simply by Yoo Jae-won’s European travelogue, while others were astonished by the technical sophistication behind the site itself. After all, existing web pages generally fell into two categories: bulletin-board style with page navigation, or vertical papyrus-scroll style that required continuous scrolling. The former was common in communities; the latter was typified by webtoons. Yoo Jae-won’s ambitious travelogue broke both molds. Strictly speaking, it still used scrolling, but the page layout dynamically changed depending on the scroll position. Photographs seemed to pour in from all directions like a photo album, one image would enlarge dramatically when selected, and short GIFs capturing Switzerland’s breathtaking landscapes would play. It was nothing like the conventional travelogue format of static photos paired with explanatory text.
Above all, the resolution and quality of every photograph were on the level of fine art. Selfies taken with prominent figures—Switzerland’s president, the speaker of the National Assembly, the president of the International Mathematical Union, Tim Berners-Lee, and other VIPs met during the European trip—also became major talking points. Such photographs had traditionally been stiff and formal, but Yoo Jae-won captured them in the relaxed, candid style of twenty-first-century snapshots. Naturally, any photos showing his parents or Tiffany were either excluded or shown only from behind; family privacy had to be protected. Even so, public interest remained intense. The fact that even a simple bowl of ramen eaten at the Matterhorn viewpoint became news was proof enough.
Yoo Jae-won’s parents, with their distinctly Korean palates, had found local food the most inconvenient part of overseas travel and had therefore packed instant ramen and gochujang. Thanks to that, Yoo Jae-won and Tiffany experienced the magic of ramen for the first time. Plain 1990s ramen, still full of MSG, tasted wonderful on its own—but eating it atop the Matterhorn viewpoint elevated the experience to another level. When they later recalled the meals they had eaten in Switzerland, the memory of that ramen often overshadowed the chef-prepared gourmet dishes. Netizens showed equal fascination with the ramen, suggesting that Korean ramen might appear at the Matterhorn viewpoint far earlier than in the original timeline.
Because the post contained so many photographs, video clips, and other multimedia elements, accessing PowerBlog.com via modem was simply impossible. Furthermore, its dynamic features were built with HTML 2.0, so other browsers could not render the page correctly. When accessed with a browser supporting only HTML 1.0, the site appeared as nothing more than an ordinary scrolling page. Consequently, the latest beta version of the ID Web Browser once again became the center of attention. It not only supported HTML 2.0 but also displayed massive numbers of high-resolution images and videos with remarkable speed—on an entirely different level from competing browsers. The same performance gap was evident on Nextcom, the most visited site of all.
“Heh. They won’t be able to copy the hardware acceleration anytime soon.”
The secret lay in leveraging the power of 3D acceleration cards. The new technology in the ID Web Browser beta went far beyond HTML 2.0. By utilizing the computational capability of 3D cards, rendering speed and responsiveness had been dramatically improved. Treating web-page objects like game textures allowed the 3D card to render them at high speed. The card’s memory could also be used to scroll through pages filled with high-resolution images as smoothly as silk. Many developers still believed 3D acceleration cards were useful only for games, yet the technology had countless applications. Web-page acceleration was merely the beginning.
The unfortunate reality was that the current acceleration features remained unstable. Compatibility with various 3D cards was inconsistent, and memory leaks sometimes caused performance to degrade below non-accelerated levels after prolonged use. That was why the software still carried the “beta” label—users were expected to understand the trade-offs. Even Android, with its elite development team, found the work challenging. Later entrants would struggle to replicate it. Naturally, the ID Web Browser’s market share would only grow stronger.
“With reactions this strong, I’ll need to upload the next piece of content quickly.”
PowerBlog.com was intended to operate on a somewhat exclusive basis. Until HTML 2.0 was officially released, only Yoo Jae-won himself would post. Afterward, he planned to select creators with compelling personal stories—soon to be known as power bloggers—and have them contribute content. Previously, high subscriber counts automatically granted power-blogger status. This time, the plan was reversed: once blogging became mainstream, the platform would open to all users. The earlier model had often led to popular creators amassing audiences with quality content only to turn their blogs into pure advertising platforms. Yoo Jae-won wanted to prevent that. He had already devised revenue-sharing arrangements with creators who produced high-quality work.
“For the next piece, maybe an unboxing and review of the watches?”
Yoo Jae-won’s home now held numerous high-end watches purchased in Switzerland. There had originally been far more, but he had distributed many to long-serving employees and given others as gifts to nearby acquaintances. A few remained for his personal use. Turning those into content seemed like a good idea. For now, however, it would have to wait. The game countless gamers had been anticipating—Warcraft: Humans and Orcs—was releasing tomorrow.