MEMO

From: Dave Smith, President and CEO
Re: The Information Superhighway
Date: September 1, 1997

Even if you have been living under a rock, it would have been hard to miss the arrival of the Internet.

It feels like it was yesterday when words like “e-mail”, “Trumpet Winsock”, and “surfing the World Wide Web” were as alien to us as “automobile” would have been to someone living one hundred years ago. Yet, those terms have quickly become an indispensable part of our lives.

As an example, just yesterday, I dictated an e-mail to Jennifer to book my trip to Aspen, and she quickly “logged-on” to her floor’s Internet computer, “dialed it up”, and surfed onto “Alta Vista” to find the fax number of our travel agency.

By all indications, the Internet is here to stay, and it will fundamentally change the way we do business. Therefore, we need to adopt it early and enthusiastically; otherwise we will fall behind and never be able to catch up.

To that end, next week we will install an ISDN line in our head office so our “Cyberspace” access is twice as fast. Managers and above will also get an Internet account on their own computers. Programmers and salespeople will also be able to request one, subject to Vice President approval.

In an era where everyone can call up any “web-page” in the world and interact with it after a short wait using technologies like “Dynamic HTML” and “Pearl”, it is clear that non-Internet software will become obsolete. In the coming days, we will mail everyone a set of Netscape Communicator 4 installation floppy disks, and we will offer courses on writing DHTML “web-pages”.

You should really learn these technologies, because next year we won’t renew our Microsoft Office support contract and all new documents and spreadsheets will have to be “web-pages” that we will view on Netscape 4.

For programmers, we will soon announce new training sessions on how to set up the “NCSA HTTPd server” and write “CGI-BIN scripts”. We will update our hiring criteria to require knowledge of HTML, VRML, and the “Pearl” programming language that is used for “CGI-BIN scripts”. Dave, our Vice President of Engineering, will send a memo soon.

I understand that these changes may seem disruptive to some of you, but we need to adapt: this is a race, and the first one to arrive in this new world will win and the rest will be left behind forever. There is already one “Yahoo!” and one “GeoCities” and one “AOL” and nobody will ever be able to dethrone them. I want our company to be up there too.

Dave

cc: All departments