This was becoming routine. At eight o’clock in the morning, yet another pack of engineers was gathered around a monitor, fingers crossed, praying that a computer connected somewhere else in the country was not disintegrating into a thousand pieces. Peter, Stivo and Steve were having possibly the most important meeting of their young company’s life. AOL was the 800-pound gorilla in this space. AOL was also the original nemesis of their company. Why take their cutting-edge technology and stack it on top of the most inelegant pile of bastard code in the country? The answer was one word: customers. Ten million of them, to be exact. They had argued with their investors for three months, but the answer was always the same. Time to market was all that mattered, and the fastest way to the party was AOL. Peter had expended every religious stance he had in the inventory, and then grumpily agreed to travel and meet with the gorilla. Stivo was convinced that it was the right way to go from the beginning. Peter was convinced that there wasn’t a deal in all of humanity that Stivo wouldn’t do in a moment.
In Vienna, Virginia, the three of them sat at the end of a surprisingly small conference room and waited for the AOL executives to come in. The good news was they had managed to set up a meeting with most of the marketing and technology leaders of the company. The bad news was if they flamed out there was not going to be a second chance. Peter was reviewing the computer that the software was going to be loaded onto. While they waited he had made sure the graphics card was at a setting that was most conducive to their software. Beyond that there was nothing else they could do but wait.
The AOL executives filed in a moment later. Steve took a quick inventory, and then leaned over to Stivo. “More technology people than marketing. Not a good sign.” Stivo then swung seamlessly into meet and greet mode, smiling expansively and handing out his card as if he had just met the greatest people in the world. Then everyone sat down, the Virtua people on one side, the AOL executives on the other side. It reminded Steve of a firing line. The lead AOL executive swung into action almost immediately.
“Well, we have heard great things about the technology that you are creating. We wanted to see it action, talk a little about how you see it being integrated into the AOL client, and then we can talk about what kind of timetable you think is needed to get this stuff live.”
Warning sign number two had just appeared. They were hoping that AOL was in deal mode. Unfortunately they were obviously still just kicking the tires. They were not interested in talking about investing. All they could do now was forge ahead and hope to get them so excited that they moved into deal mode. As previously decided, Stivo led the overall presentation up to the technology presentation. Then Peter took over to explain the technology. Steve had heard this so many times that he started to tune him out almost before he started. Instead he watched the reaction of the executives across the table. The marketing executives starting tuning out the technology discussion almost immediately. The four technology folks were a split deal. The two higher ups were listening to the presentation, but they had a slightly glassed over look to them. The other two were hardcore engineers. They were writing as fast as their stubby little fingers could go. This could mean only two things. One, they were about to rape their technology. They were going to plumb them for every piece of info they could, and then ship the computer down to some dungeon in the basement of AOL where a cadre of hackers would reverse engineer the software for themselves. No one was as bad as Microsoft in this sort of thing, but AOL did have a reputation for some corporate pilfering.
Of course, this was under the assumption that AOL was interested at all in this technology. The second possibility was that the gathered executives were nothing more than a well-dressed hit squad. They had put this meeting together because a very powerful venture firm had requested it. They were taking the meeting, but the two scribbling dervishes were there to make sure that they had enough ammunition to explain why they chose to pass on the deal. Either way, Steve already knew that this meeting was dead on arrival.
They had now arrived at the actual technology presentation. Peter went over to the computer and the engineers gathered around behind him. Three of the four marketing executives excused themselves. They swore that they would pop back in later. Not that it really mattered. The computer was conveniently already logged into AOL. Peter clicked on the Internet button and moved quickly to their web site. Three more clicks, a quick registration form, and they started to download the software. Steve noted that one of the engineers started a stopwatch. They wanted to find out how long it took to download the client. Steve knew they were starting to build the arguments for why the Virtua software was not compatible with the “AOL experience.”
One of geeks spoke up. “What is the lowest processor configuration you can run this on? And also, do you have any plans to create a Macintosh client?”
A progress bar was tediously crawling across the screen. The bastards had them on a slow modem connection, and it was taking forever to download their software. Peter was glad to have an excuse to draw their attention away from it. “The configuration we gave you is the lowest we can go and still have enough horsepower for both the graphics and the communications software. As for other clients, we are purely PC-based right now.”
The geek didn’t like this. “One of the things we pride ourselves for is the ability for anyone with any computer and any connection to be able to use AOL effectively. We don’t like to segment our users into groups that can use extended features and those that don’t.”
Peter was ready. “Remember, we will not be out of beta for another six months. Another six to integrate it seamlessly into your client and we are a year out. By then, our base client will be practically a relic.”
Everyone laughed at this. Premature obsolescence was a standing joke in this industry. However, the geek wasn’t done yet. “How about connectivity? The majority of our connections are at or under 26. Is your software going to be able to work within those constraints? I mean, it’s taking a while just to download your client.”
Sure enough, the progress bar was still inching its way across the screen. Peter slogged forward. “The way we have designed the software is to download the majority of the graphical elements with the initial installation package. From that point forward we actually only send about 19k worth of data.”
As if on cue, the installation package finished downloading and then started loading the pieces of their client onto the PC. There was a soft click as the quiet geek stopped the stopwatch. Steve didn’t even want to know what the final tally was. He made a silent prayer as their installer threw pieces of code around the machine, and hopefully was figuring out how to work with all the different pieces of hardware. Finally a little box appeared on the screen that said simply, “would you like to start the Virtua client?”
Peter pressed the yes key, and the screen went black. A moment later their splash screen with the product name and version appeared. This was a stall tactic to cover for the fact that they were loading in the rendering software engine and bringing the communications on line. A second later they were flying over a three dimensional city, and then they were floating down slowly and ending up on street level. The city represented what they thought a 3D AOL would look like. They had the various areas in the web broken into “neighborhoods” around interests such as sports or business. And in the center of each neighborhood was a virtual café, which represented an AOL chat room about that neighborhood’s subject. They has done everything they could to replicate the AOL experience in three-dimensional cyberspace. The only question was whether they were going to buy it.
The transitional moment when the viewer was floating down into the virtual world was the most delicate moment for the software. As previous tests had proven, loading all the scene information on entrance slammed the modem link with more data than it would see any moment thereafter. On top of the scene information, the client software had to figure out where all the other “people” were in the “street” and then place them in the scene before the little landing routine ended. This caused even more virtual straining. If things were going to blow up, this is where it was going to happen.
But everything loaded in. To the surprise of all, the world was fine, people were milling about and acting like this was the most exciting thing ever. They were truly in a three dimensional on-line service. For a moment the geeks actually stopped talking, timing and writing and just stared at the screen. For a moment Steve actually thought they were going to pull it off.
Then reality rose up and bit them in the proverbial ass. First the scenery flickered and stuttered and then froze. It looked suspiciously like the rendering engine was about to suffer a heart attack. A moment later the screen made one final heave, and then flipped into the blue screen of death. The rendering engine had crashed and taken the entire client software package with it. The geeks snickered to themselves. Peter and Stivo were frozen. Steve did the only thing he could think of. He reached over and gave the computer the three finger salute to restart it.
They were done.