What’s more, costs for newer customers of Branch Mall were higher. Grant had been the first merchant there and enjoyed a break. Now Branch was charging thousands a year for Web areas that included elaborate programming and creative work.[[2.6]]

Larry Grant, in any event, believed in the Net and in the Mall itself. His virtual operation wasn’t costing him that much, and I suspected that even with somewhat higher expenses, other tenants might do fine in the end if they were in the right business. “Number one,” Grant said, “we don’t have to take and buy more inventory. Number two, we don’t have to have a bigger facility. And number three, we don’t need a sales staff. We can do with the staff we have in handling these orders. It’s a neat way to find new business. I don’t have to handle any of the products directly. The customer does all the ordering through the company in his area and it’s shipped from the company to them, and I get my commission check at the end of the month.” He liked the concept so much that he started a Fuller Brush franchise on the Net. The same key principles applied: No inventory to worry about and no sales staff, just some dealings with Branch and orders emerging from a fax machine.

Merchants like Bob Lilienfeld might fare well without a cybermall involved—they knew how to spread word about themselves on the Net by way of newsgroups and mailing lists—but I could also see the possibilities for people such as Larry Grant as long as they kept their expectations to a reasonable level. Grant himself didn’t view the other flower shops at Branch Mall as direct competitors; he depicted himself as more of a general florist than the others, what with their specialties in Hawaiian flowers and the like. Certainly a good cybermall, like the brick-and-concrete version, needed a good tenant mix—with a toy store not appearing on the same screen as, say, a sex toy shop.

If that right mix wasn’t around, why have the mall in the first place? While it was true that the Net shrank distances, it did take time to move from screen to screen at typical modem speeds. And yet, reflecting, I could indeed see a future for malls. Even when search engines were easier to use, people might still not avail themselves of them—preferring to browse instead. So the mall concept might well endure to the advantage of people like Larry Grant.

All kinds of people itched for their percentages of the cybermall business. Jon Zeeff, the mall operator who had set up Larry Grant with his electronic billboard, had once written medical software. David Fry was a Harvard Ph.D. in computer science, came from a family in the printing business, and ran an offshoot called Fry Multimedia. Ann Arbor wasn’t Silicon Valley, but just in that one university town, at least three local business people were on the Web in a serious way, if you included Bob Lilienfeld. Like him, Fry wisely thought in the long term. Drumming up business from well-known brands such as Ragu spaghetti sauce, he did not promise an instant audience in the millions. He urged companies to go on the Web, experiment with interactive advertising, and make their mistakes before the Net became a truly mass medium for Madison Avenue.

Some get-rich-quickers, of course, also were jostling for virtual tenants; even Canter and Siegel showed up by way of an area called Cybersell, and I enjoyed the irony. C & S had carpet bombed thousands of newsgroups with the same message—while encouraging other merchants to ignore conventional Netiquette—and yet now they were also relying on the more focused approach of a Web area.

Phone companies, too, wanted to run malls on the World Wide Web. And that created problems for some. While the Net might use their phone lines, many of these corporations felt out of place in an anarchistic environment over which they had far less than the accustomed amount of control. In the mall business they would be competing against nimble entrepreneurs like Zeeff and Fry. Still, phone companies could take advantage of their existing networks to one extent or another, and if the Yellow Pages were going online in a new incarnation, then the Baby Bells and AT&T wanted their share of the business. Of all the mall-related efforts in early 1995, the most ambitious may have been from a phone company, MCI. It exemplified—as I soon discovered in the most direct of ways—both the best and the worst of Big Business on the Web.

MCI’s Giant Cybermall and the

Search For Darlene

MCI and the Internet had A History. The Net used phone lines from many companies, but MCI had long been one of the major players here; some 40 percent of the Internet traffic in the United States passed over its cables, and nowadays the senior vice-president of data architecture was none other than Vint Cerf. As much as anyone he was Mr. Net, one of the founding fathers. MCI also employed the head of a standard-setting body called the Internet Engineering Task Force. Unsurprisingly, MCI marketers were coming out with statements in the vein of: When you think Internet, we want you to think of us.