How the Web Won: The Inside Story of How a Motley Crew of Outsiders Hijacked the Information Superhighway and Struck a Blow for Human Freedom

This firsthand, in-depth account of the World Wide Web's earliest "start-up" years will cause you to re-think everything you think you know about the Web, start-up culture, and how it all came to be.

"The story of the man who built the bridge from offline to digital marketing." - Robert W. Bly
Author, marketing consultant, veteran copywriter

“We are fortunate to have among us THE visionary pioneer who recognized what the World Wide Web really was and what it would become. Before just about anybody, Ken McCarthy saw it as ad media. He tells all. I urge getting it and reading it.” - Dan Kennedy
Consultant and author of the No BS business series (over 1 million copies sold)

“Fascinating and hard-hitting.” - Richard Koch
Author of the million-copy bestseller The 80/20 Principle

"A rare look at the decisions and events that shaped the internet into the commercial hub it is today." - Robert Skrob
CEO, Membership Service, Inc. Author of Retention Point and The Connector Effect.

"An epic tale, well and conversationally told, offering deep-but-accessible insight into the evolution of our information superhighway.“ - The Chronogram Magazine, Anne Pyburn Craig

"...The best of “Liar’s Poker” and “Infinite Jest” rolled into one book." - Amazon review

At the start of 1993, no one had heard of the World Wide Web, but by the middle of 1995 it had turned Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the media world upside down.

How the Web Won reveals many previously untold details behind the dramatic emergence of the World Wide Web and how it came along just in time to thwart the last step of Bill Gates' plan for permanent domination of all the world's personal computers.

Was the Web a planned resistance on the part of a handful of digital rebels or was its unlikely and unexpected ascendance one of the happiest accidents in human history? Or a mixture of both?

Unlike other Internet histories, How the Web Won focuses on the Web’s critical formative years, 1993 to 1995, and does it in a comprehensive way that no other author has yet attempted. The narrative is animated by the previously untold story of how a flash of insight into the commercial value of clicks broke a logjam and transformed the Internet into the multi-trillion-dollar marketplace we know today.

Stories from the formative years of the Web rarely, if ever, told about Marc Andreessen and Netscape, Tim Bernes-Lee and CERN, Bill Gates and Microsoft, San Francisco's pioneering digital multimedia community, Wired Magazine, the pre-Internet BBS culture, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's early Apple days, and one of the world's most influential, but almost never mentioned, tech incubators which gave birth to both touchscreens and the banner ad.

Fully indexed and accompanied by unique documents and rare artifacts from the era.