Newsgroups Revisited
A post on a message board reminded to today of my early days online. It mentioned newsgroups (Usenet), which were the Internet's earliest message boards, a true revolution in their day, but these days little more than Spam based rubbish.
At the time, I was running an IT Recruitment business with brother. That year, must have been 1993 or 1994, we recruited a graduate who was an extremely keen advocate of all things IT.
As we only had a Packard Bell PC purchased on my maxed out credit card at the time, the idea that it could be used to generate fees was more than a little absurd to us.
However, our new graduate (his name is Frank Morris - thanks Frank!), one day suggested that we go online to look for new candidates and to post jobs.
We had no idea what he meant, but trusting his judgement, we invested around £120 on a modem and we bought a subscription to a service called win-uk.net, which we needed to get us online.
The first step was to subscribe to the two previously mentioned news groups.
I remember my brother and I saying, "How does this work Frank? Where do the bloody jobs go once we press send"?
We knew how faxes worked - and they hadn't been invented that long ago. But to post something where there was no paper... How weird was that?
Anyway, we had a quick look at some of the jobs that were being posted on uk.jobs.offered. There weren't many, but I was certain I could write better ones.
The key to a good (or bad) ad is the headline, so we came up with the highly original, "A BAG FULL OF IT JOBS"
Immediately and without warning, nothing happened.
It was 5p.m. and so we went home.
The next morning, I fired up our email account and sat there waiting for our dial-up modem to spring into action and do whatever it was supposed to do.
Message after message came in - they told us to stop shouting. They told us to post only one job at a time. They asked who the hell we thought we were.
And then a strange thing happened.
CV's started arriving. Not just one or two, but hundreds of the things. Applications came in by the bucket load. These were IT people after all. The better ones were looking for new jobs online at a time when most people didn't know what online was!
Suddenly we had access to one of the richest sources of candidates that we'd ever seen. Not only that, but we discovered that people were posting their profiles on uk.jobs.wanted - so we just subscribed and got notified of every new candidate that came along.
Our world changed overnight. The local competition took a full 12-18 months to cotton on.
That single advertisement for a bag full of IT jobs, netted us around £40,000. I've yet to make a better headline - and being honest it probably wasn't even my headline.
Then we got a call one from a guy called Robbie Cowling. He wanted to show us a new service. A web site. We batted his calls away at the time.
Who needed web sites when you could fill jobs from a newsgroup.
Anyway, we didn't know what a web site was at that time.
Robbie's business was (and still is) called jobserve.com - eventually we joined and it did make us a lot of money. It made Robbie a fortune - and all from a portakabin at the bottom of his garden. I remember having to FAX our jobs to his staff so they could then enter them online each night...
How times have changed. I could put up a fully featured job site with everything that jobserve has got in less than a day now - but I could never replicate that success.
This post is dedicated to Frank and Robbie - Frank for introducing me to the net and planting a seed and to Robbie for showing me what can be if you just grasp the nettle and go for it.
If only I could turn back the clock a little...
posted by David Carter @ 08:19
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David- From my subcriber's email this morning compounded with additions sent in by readers:
Rory Sutherland now chairman of Ogilvy was fired as a copywriter for Microsoft for suggesting they should bundle a modem with every operating system.
In 1996, when I was at a certain very large financial services company which does almost all of its business online today, and a small group of us were campaigning to start some kind of Worldwide Web (as we called it then) initiative, my boss, quoting her boss, said, "Very interesting, but I don't see the business purpose."
Leading the charge, back in 1876, President Rutherford B. Hayes saw the telephone for the first time. In reaction, he said to Alexander Graham Bell, “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” During the same year, a Western Union Internal Memo predicted similarly that, “The ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered a means of communication.” How wrong they both were.
Forward thinkers haven’t always done better. In 1926, Lee DeForest, a pioneer in the development of radio, said of television: “While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it to be an impossibility…a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”
In 1927, Harry Warner, President of Warner Brothers, said, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” The same year, however (apparently at the urgings of brother Sam, the studio’s co-founder), Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer, one of the most expensive films they’d ever made. (Sam died before the New York premier). Turned out, The Jazz Singer was a major hit and helped usher in the era of “talking pictures.”
Not even experienced technologists are immune. In a famous recent example, one from a technologist who’d presumably know better, Ken Olsen, then President, Chairman and Founder of DEC, famously said in 1977: “There is no reason for any individuals to have a computer in their home.” He was right - there wasn’t much of a reason given the state of in the industry at the time - but fast forward a few years, or a decade or two, and how different the story became.
Optimists championing technology have fallen into similar traps at the opposite pole of opinion. In one example, in an 1858 book called "The Story of the Telegraph," authors Charles F. Briggs and Augustus Maverick wrote: "Of all the marvelous achievements of modern science the electric telegraph is transcendentally the greatest and most serviceable to mankind … [it] binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist.." Impossible? Not at all.
The reality of futurism or any kind of technology prediction is they’re often going to be wrong, either too conservative or too optimistic.
The only thing we know for sure about the future, is that it will won’t look anything like today.
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