0.14 Revelation  (Page 10/12)

The campaign would prove to be ferocious, the almost-daily polling as election day neared showing the yes votes drawing inexorably closer in number to the nay-sayers. Even in 1995, when outraged opposition to the subsidy was almost unanimous, it was clear that the script would play out the way it always did in Seattle and elsewhere, and the billionaire would get his stadium. Yet nothing about either stadium deal made sense, economic or otherwise. When the dust would clear in June 1997 and a narrow majority approved the gift to Allen, a perplexed Art Thiel would write in the Seattle P-I , “We just agreed to build a stadium with a roof for playing baseball in summer, and a stadium without a roof for playing football in winter. Think about it.”

In 1996, the Weekly ’s connection to the Internet consisted of a single computer in the editorial department with a modem and an America Online account. Writers would use it only occasionally, to research the particular odd topic that had information about it residing somewhere on the Web, or to send an email message. The machine was painfully slow, and few people—myself included—had much use for it.

I came into the office one afternoon, though, and found a group of writers gathered around it. They were looking at a new web site for a Seattle company called Amazon.com, and I could hear them reacting with a mix of confusion and admiration: “Look at that! Look at that!”… “How do they do this?”… “I can’t figure it out….” Then above the tumult came the voice of Mike Romano: “I think it’s, like, a scam to get people to give them their email addresses.”

After they dispersed, I sat down to study the site in detail. It claimed to offer electronic access to one million book titles, along with the ability to purchase them on line and have them delivered to your door. A million titles! The largest bookstore in Seattle, located in the lavishly updated University Village shopping center, was a Barnes&Noble reputed to be the second-largest Barnes&Noble in the country, and it held only 150,000 titles. Amazon.com appeared to make available every American English-language book currently in print. I started randomly typing in authors and titles, and for each one I got back a screen with a picture of the book, its price, and the number of days it would take for the book to show up at my house.

The site seemed at once ingenious and obvious. It looked like a giant step toward what Bill Gates had called, in his recently released The Road Ahead , “low-friction, low-overhead capitalism” that created “efficient electronic markets that provide nearly complete instantaneous information about worldwide supply, demand, and prices.” You could see at a glance what the Web site presaged: direct connection between buyer and seller, over the Internet. No more retailers! Pretty soon there’d be no more wholesalers! Even Amazon would eventually be obsolete! Everything was going to be cheaper! And the first company to demonstrate how well it could work was right here in Seattle!