Fifteen years ago yesterday, the World Wide Web became official and was put into the public domain. In honor of that fact, one of our colleagues at frog (thanks Ben Tomassetti!) brought in a birthday cake for it today:

(Thanks to Cary Gibaldi for the photo) 

Note the nerd humor with the binary numbering of the years…there are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t. I can’t say that it actually was the “moistest cake I’ve ever tasted”, but, like the web, it was free, so I’m not going to complain.

This blog post at SiliconValley.com from yesterday sums up the situation nicely:

It could easily have gone differently. Fifteen years ago, the management of the CERN physics lab in Geneva could have decided that this World Wide Web thing that researcher Tim Berners-Lee was working on might have some proprietary value down the road and put it under lock, key and license. But they didn’t. Fifteen years ago today, they put it into the public domain and changed history. Of the many Web milestones we celebrate, that makes this one special.

The CERN directors took some convincing. “The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the Web was going to be,” Berners-Lee’s colleague Robert Cailliau told the BBC. “We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore CERN couldn’t hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away. We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favor of that.”

 

There is an interesting article in the April 2008 Harvard Business Review about how to be a successful services company, and one of the examples they talk about is Progressive Insurance. They talk about the two features of Progressive which are most distinctive and visible - their white vans, and how they list competitor’s rates alongside their own. As the article describes:

When someone insured by Progressive is involved in an auto accident, the company immediately sends out a van to assist that person and to assess the damage on the spot… Customers love this level of responsiveness and give the company high marks for service.

But customers are very price sensitive about auto insurance and so would not pay more for this service in their monthly premiums. So why does Progressive do it? Because it cuts down on fraud. Turns out most insurance fraud happens when people make claims on accidents that never happened or which were staged. This results in expensive legal costs. By dispatching a representative to the scene immediately, Progressive helps prevent this type of fraud, and even discourages it pre-emptively because people will expect a representative to show up and therefore not even attempt fraud.

 

It’s not that Progressive is determined to go one better than rivals to win the business. In fact, Progressive’s is the lowest quote only about half the time. What Progressive does believe is that is quote is the right one given the probability of that person’s getting into an accident - a probability that the insurer is best in class at determining. If indeed its quote is spot-on, then allowing a competitor to insure the customer at a lower rate is doubly effective: It frees Progressive from a money-losing propoition while burdening its competitor with the unprofitable account. Thus a level of service that looks downright altruistic to the customer actually benefits the company.

In other words, potential customers self-select not to use Progressive, but still come away feeling impressed by Progressive’s service and trustworthyness. If at some point in the future when their driving record has improved they may return to Progressive’s site and see that their price has improved, and potentially switch. So it’s a win-win for Progressive and buyers, only Progressive’s competitors lose. The perfect scenario!

 

If you’re a parent, here’s a cool new product: Cucuyo. It’s portable baby changing station and diaper bag. It was designed by a couple of friends of mine, husband and wife team Ana Reza and Page Hadden (she formerly of frog design and Pottery Barn, he of Timbuk2 and Lowe Pro, so they know their stuff). It folds up sort of like a burrito, and unrolls into a pad for doing diaper changes, and has a pouch for storing new and old diapers. As they say, there’s no need to have a dedicated diaper bag, as this fulfills the role. Plus it comes in a bunch of cool colors and patterns.

A new look for the blog, I was getting a bit tired of the “web 2.0” look of the previous design. This one is pretty stripped down and simple. I’ve removed the photo header (all the photos I’ve used there have been ones I took myself) and instead am hoping to boost the number of photos I include in posts themselves, now that I’m doing more photography.

If you are in the business of designing products, have I got a book for you: It’s called Manufacturing Processes for Design Professionals ($60 on Amazon). This may sound expensive until you see it: it’s a monster of a book at 500+ pages and with 1200 color illustrations and weighs several pounds.

 

A huge range of materials and manufacturing processes are covered in detail, richly communicated with great on-the-shop-floor photos taken by the author himself, Rob Thompson, who is an industrial designer. There are sections on familiar categories like metals…

And plastics…

…and less familiar ones like caning: 

 

This is really a breathtaking effort in its scope and detail. Highly recommended.