How the Web Won: The Inside Story of How a Motley Crew of Outsiders Hijacked the Information Superhighway and Struck a Blow for Human Freedom

This firsthand, in-depth account of the World Wide Web's earliest "start-up" years will cause you to re-think everything you think you know about the Web, start-up culture, and how it all came to be.

"I doubt if anyone has had a greater impact on how people persuade, influence, and sell online than Ken." - Drayton Bird
Author of Common Sense Direct & Digital Marketing. Former Worldwide Creative Director & Vice Chairman, Ogilvy Direct

"A compulsively readable account of how the Internet became what it is today. McCarthy's writing is vivid, sometimes startling, and readable as a thriller. I suspect it will stand a classic. - Grevel Lindop
Poet and academic. Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Manchester. Author of The Opium Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, A Literary Guide to the Lake District, and numerous books of poetry.

"Fascinating, funny, and wildly entertaining." - Jonathan Mizel
CEO, Cyberwave Media Inc., online business entrepreneur & thought leader since 1993

"An epic tale, well and conversationally told, offering deep-but-accessible insight into the evolution of our information superhighway.“ - The Chronogram Magazine, Anne Pyburn Craig

"A stand-out read." - BookLife (a division of Publishers Weekly)

"Like getting a peek at the early side of the Big Bang…" - Steve O'Keefe
Author of Publicity on the Internet, personally tutored Jeff Bezos on the fine points of how to sell books online

"The story of the man who built the bridge from offline to digital marketing." - Robert W. Bly
Author, marketing consultant, veteran copywriter

"Easily one of the single greatest books about marketing I've ever read..." - Ben Settle

"...The best of “Liar’s Poker� and “Infinite Jest� rolled into one book." - Amazon reviewer

“Fascinating and hard-hitting.� - Richard Koch
Author of the million-copy bestseller The 80/20 Principle

“THE visionary pioneer who recognized what the World Wide Web really was and what it would become. Before just about anybody, Ken McCarthy saw it as ad media. He tells all. I urge getting it and reading it.� - Dan Kennedy
Consultant & author of the No BS business series (over 1 million copies sold)

At the start of 1993, no one had heard of the World Wide Web, but by the middle of 1995 it had turned Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the media world upside down.

How the Web Won reveals many previously untold details behind the dramatic emergence of the World Wide Web and how it came along just in time to thwart the last step of Bill Gates' plan for permanent domination of all the world's personal computers.

Was the Web a planned resistance on the part of a handful of digital rebels or was its unlikely and unexpected ascendance one of the happiest accidents in human history? Or a mixture of both?

Unlike other Internet histories, How the Web Won focuses on the Web’s critical formative years, 1993-1995, in a comprehensive way that no other author has yet attempted. The narrative is animated by the previously untold story of how a flash of insight into the commercial value of clicks broke a logjam and transformed the Internet into the multi-trillion-dollar marketplace we know today.

Stories from the formative years of the Web rarely, if ever, told about Marc Andreessen and Netscape, Tim Bernes-Lee and CERN, Bill Gates and Microsoft, San Francisco's pioneering digital multimedia community, Wired Magazine, the pre-Internet BBS culture, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's early Apple days, and one of the world's most influential, but almost never mentioned, tech incubators which gave birth to both touchscreens and the banner ad.

Fully indexed and accompanied by unique documents and rare artifacts from the era.