The Four Finns Who Pioneered the Graphical Browser

Two years later...

WWW-Talk Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu) Thu, 25 Feb 93 21:09:02 -0800

"I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

IMG

Required argument is SRC="url".

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag's occurrence."

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...

Recent past of Finnish sci&tech includes a bewildering amount of similar cases of wasted potential.

Telecommunication is the worst area. Its mega-successes, such as SMS can be described as lucky mistakes, while several very potent innovations have gone to waste in state telco's (TeliaSonera) and cell manufacturers.

If a product reached the market, it was often too premature, such as 1999 Benefon Esc GPS-phone (5 years premature), or its launch marketing failed badly.

I believe Finland produces second most patents per capita. But lack of funding (esp. in 1-5M range) and lack of marketing/commercialization skills destroys the ample potential. Finns are generally seen as a "country of engineers". This might be the key to understanding why recent extraordinary successes like Skype (Sweden/Estonia) have appeared in neighboring countries. Finland has succeeded lately in open source sw (Linux, MySQL), not much else.

I would place a lot of the blaim of not identifying these candidates to the Finnish VC industry. It has been dominated by lazy state controlled institutions. They haven't been greedy(?) enough to invest in big plays. Only safe bets or dumping money to major players such as Nokia.

Another story that shows it isn't the idea, it's the execution. As they say in the article, it was tough to get any funding in Finland at the time, but that's probably faint consolation now. Who knows what might have happened if they had actually released it and kept working on it in their spare time.