The Internet and Tipping Point
We use the Internet every day, and one could say that we depend on it quite profoundly. But nowadays, people do not wonder how it became so widespread. How did Internet boom so fast in the late 1990s? This is a simple question that deserve an elegant and sophisticated answer.
In our Networks course, we have learned about network effects, information cascades, and tipping points – these terms help explain many of the future human decisions.
We have learned how a new product can become successful. There is some tipping point in a graph that represents a number of people currently using the new product. If this number of users surpasses the critical or tipping point, then the product is expected to become very popular and successful. In the early stage, it is possible that some new product could have a few users that is below the tipping point. Seeing that, one possible way to get past this tipping point is to create a buzz that causes more users to adapt the product. This buzz could be created by adding a new exciting feature into the product.
This is precisely what happened with the Internet with the advancement of web pages, when JavaScript was introduced in 1995. JavaScript was the perfect buzz because it made boring web pages on the internet dynamic, interactive, and useful.
As talked about in the article, webpages were rather flat and made with static HTML before 1995. However, the Internet would change fast after 1995 because web pages could now have JavaScript. It could have been the tipping point that made Internet a success because it allowed web pages to be much more like an application. As mentioned in the article, having web pages for companies was becoming mainstream in the years 1995-2000. So, ” Investors started throwing money at anything related to the web; in many cases, if a company was seen to be on the web, then their stock prices would shoot up.”
Source: https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-the-world-wide-web–webdesign-8710