The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

William Cass – National Sales Manager, Tuatara Brewery

“I’m not a technologist, I’m a sales and marketing guy. But there is a photo that exists today of my brother and I in his office with a computer that we went and bought. We downloaded some telephone answering software and we had another PC with a copy of Outlook running on it. We would ring the computer, record a message, Andrew would write the message down on a piece of paper then run to the other side of the room, put it into a copy of Outlook and then fire it back to me as a working concept of what we were meant to try and achieve. So it was very fundamental, very basic. Right around the time where people were starting to understand that the Internet and Web pages could be used for a lot more than just displaying information. It was around the beginning of Java, for example, and rich applications and things like that were starting to be mentioned – even though I had no concept of what they were. We decided very early on that we would be entirely Web-based as an application and as a service and made the decision within the first few weeks of really getting into the project that we would not be putting any software out there.”