Talk about your bad business models. Imagine a company with a product that takes over 70 years of RD to develop, requires tens of thousands of skilled laborers to produce, has little funding and almost no management experience, and then constantly misses its product launch deadlines. Oh, and one of your most valuable employees is a certified lunatic, incarcerated in an insane asylum after committing a bizarre murder. Sound like another nutty Silicon Valley startup? Actually, this is the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a story familiar to readers of the national bestseller, The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester. The book explores the relationship between Professor James Murray, who dedicated his last 40 years to managing the project, and Dr. W.C. Minor, the certified lunatic who, as a volunteer editor over the course of those same decades, sent in more than 10,000 submissions to the OED staff from his room in a London mental hospital. In all, when it was finally completed in 1928, the first edition of the OED--comprised of 10 volumes--totaled 15,490 pages and defined 414,800 words, assembled by an estimated 2,000 volunteers. Cut to 1998. Nearing the end of the millennium and approaching a new spin on a similarly massive undertaking. This time, the medium is the Internet, and the challenge is to identify and organize all of its content under one user-friendly roof, enabling search engines to access and deliver this information to the millions of information-hungry Web surfers. Like the daunting task faced by the OED, the trouble with cataloging the more than one billion Web pages of cyberspace is that the number just keeps growing. But unlike the OED, there is a VC-funded shark pool full of startups struggling to establish a viable business model for this market.
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