How to Make Your Mark

Meanwhile, executives within DEC mulled over what to do about the overnight success of an emerging business that none of them understood. And Monier was learning that his role as an advocate for users carried little weight in business discussions. "I couldn't influence AltaVista's future," he says. "I could throw all of the most amazing technology on it, but I couldn't make a basic business decision. I was not empowered to do that. Looking back, I see that the chances of success were really slight, smaller than I realized at the time. DEC was not exactly a stronghold of Internet luminaries."

Jumping into the IPO mania of the time, DEC decided to spin off AltaVista as a separate company with Ilene Lang, a recruit from Lotus, at the helm. Lang picked several other pieces of Internet-based DEC software and grouped it all under the AltaVista brand name. From Monier's perspective, it was a way for bad software to get a free ride on the brand that he'd built -- a claim that he says was borne out in the fact that the search engine generated the largest share of the division's revenues but required only a fraction of the staff of the other products. Lang defends the strategy and counters that AltaVista produced just about a third of the division's revenues.

By this time, most of Monier's energy was used up fighting over advertising, user specs, and vision -- so much so that when engineer Eric Billingsley joined the AltaVista team in 1996 as a Webmaster for one of the software sites, he was warned that Monier was a "scary guy" whom he should try to avoid. But when Billingsley met Monier and heard his take on what AltaVista's strategy should be, he thought that Monier was the only one talking sense. He joined Monier as a technical caretaker for the search engine.

In the summer of 1997, DEC pulled the plug on the planned IPO and brought AltaVista back into the company fold, in part, Lang says, as a last-ditch effort to save the business by turning it into an "Internet-solutions company." Frustrated by the move, Lang left DEC and later joined a startup.