Look at the WHOIS registration dates for the internet domains of the Fortune 500 in 1996. Almost all businesses knew within a few years that it was valuable to them. Go on the Wayback Machine (starts in '96) and check out the various websites for General Electric, Toyota, GM, you name it. They were there. Here's a taste from the Fortune 500[1] in 1996:
So there you have it - 9/10 of the most valuable companies in the world had a domain name and website by 1995 (the only one missing being a tobacco giant). I don't think I would say "most businesses didn't believe it was relevant to them".
I don't know why we've moved the goalposts to 1994. Anyway, ENS has been available for five years (ethereum for seven, blockchain for 13). What businesses that are doing something other than sell their crypto project have an ENS domain?
You're accurate in that the plumber down the street, local dentist, bakery, etc likely didn't see the relevance of the web in 1994-1996. 13 years after bitcoin later I've been to maybe five of these types of businesses that take crypto or have anything to do with blockchain. 13 years after the release of the web there were over 85 million websites with a billion eyeballs.
Bitcoin didn't even show up on Google Trends until 2011. Two years after the web 9/10 of the top 10 Fortune 500 had a domain.
I'm doing my best to be respectful but how is this even a debate at this point?
1994 was just the only stat I could easily find, only trying to show the web was pretty small back then.
I don't think crypto is doing anything useful. It's been around long enough to have had important things (other than trading crypto tokens) built on it.
I just don't think most businesses saw the relevance of the internet in 1995, but it certainly grew fast and kept growing.
Not trying to be disrespectful, I just think we may be talking past each other a bit.
I think I generally agree: “most businesses” would include the guy who mows lawns or repairs shoes, but I think I would draw a divide for professional or especially technical services — they might not have been heavily online but I think they were starting to think that was becoming expected and if they did anything exchanging non-massive files there was a big time advantage to not paying FedEx or a courier to take floppies or CDs around town.
Heh. 1994 was when I helped convince the large technical service business I worked for that we should have an internet connection.
The big use case was downloading drivers and other things that previously had to posted on floppy disks, which often took weeks.
We also got web browsing, but there really wasn't much up there to begin with. You could play guess the domain name or find a few link listings on some pages. Altavista appeared pretty soon though.
Yeah, we take downloads for granted these days but FTP sure freed up a lot of waste time compared to filling floppies (remember people juggling how to pack them since each one cost enough money to add up?) and delivering them, or, later, having burn a new CD with updates for a handful of files.
Not only the guy who mows lawns or repairs shoes. Most small to medium non-technical organisations didn't use it. I did technical support for all kinds: hotels, publishing houses, printers, warehouses, charities... They were often installing leased ISDN lines to link their branches.
Definitely — I was mostly thinking of what the breakdown was for number of businesses versus the number of employees or sales volume. Starting around 1998, we had a client (spa.com) who was trying to build an online info & booking site for spas and you had a huge divide there with some spas being relatively large, stable operations where they had a T3 to a large facility with a ton of rooms and others being a 2 room operation out a dirt road in New Mexico with a maximum-length phone line barely capable of receiving faxes. On paper they both count as a business.
