Tim Bray
Biomedical Visualization
Open for Business
In 1989, after an enormously successful dictionary launch, Bray and two colleagues pulled the high-performance search engine and dropped it into a start up company called Open Text. The company coasted, then surged, drafting on a runaway Internet.
“Our software could search and retrieve or display text over a network, a pretty niche play,” Bray remembers. “But in 1994 I heard a conference speaker say that search engines would be big on the Internet, and in five seconds all the pieces just fell into place in my head. I realized that we could build such a thing with our technology.”
A website Bray intended as a clever marketing trick to show off his Internet search engine got very sticky very quickly, one of only a few sites, early in 1995, to register a million hits a day. “Suddenly, “ Bray adds, “we had a deal with Yahoo to be their backend, when they had only 11 employees. Our traffic through our Web server was going up 20% per week for months. Investment bankers stood in line outside our door.”
“In 1994 I heard a conference speaker say that search engines would be big on the Internet, and in five seconds all the pieces just fell into place in my head.”
Next Rocket
Bray left Open Text in 1996 after a successful IPO. And in a nice meta turn of events, his next adventure in data exchange found him. Jon Bosak, a senior engineer at Sun, asked Bray to sit on a committee to support SGML on the Web. “That was the committee that wrote XML,” Bray explains. “Jon called me in July 1996 and the first XML document was published in November that year. Once again, a rocket launch.”
And again, a rocket launched from a Web platform. “People wanted to use the Web for more than just looking at pictures and reading text, they wanted to run computer programs over it. HTML was not well suited for that, so we built XML.”
“What we didn’t see,” Bray adds, “was how big that opportunity was.” Big enough that his and Bosak’s guerilla marketing efforts amounted to excessive force: “It was like throwing your weight against a door that turned out not to be latched. Nearly everybody said, ‘Yeah, I need this.’”
Not even the scale of the need prepared Bray for the scope of the deployments. “XML is used for banking transactions, for interchanging prices in condo developments and for exporting data from iTunes,” he points out. “None of those things were remotely on our minds when we were building it.”