BackWeb Technologies

» see backweb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I never installed BackWeb. The part of this company that reached my machines showed up twenty years later under someone else's name, because in 2009 BackWeb sued Microsoft over the patents behind Background Intelligent Transfer Service, which is the thing that has been quietly pulling Windows Update down in the background of every Windows box I have ever owned.

The company was founded in Israel in late 1995 by Eli Barkat with four others, out of the BRM group that had already produced Check Point. The pitch was push. Instead of a person opening a browser and going to find news, the news would arrive on its own, in the background, and tap the person on the shoulder once it was there. In 1996 and 1997 this was not a feature idea. It was widely held to be the next shape of the whole internet, and Wired put it on the cover to say so.

Three companies led the category. PointCast was the famous one, Marimba was the one with the Java pedigree, and BackWeb was the Israeli one that Forbes ran a piece about in July 1997 under the headline "Pushy Israelis". BackWeb raised $13 million privately from investors including Goldman Sachs and Intel, then took $60 million out of a NASDAQ IPO in June 1999.

The IPO was almost exactly at the end. By 1999 the argument for push had collapsed, mostly because the thing pushing content at people over a corporate network was also saturating that network, and IT departments had started blocking it on sight.

~ the case file ~

~ what push actually meant ~

Nobody in 1997 was distinguishing carefully between technologies here. What BackWeb shipped was a client that polled servers on a schedule and pulled down channel content when it found something new, which is a poll wearing a push costume, and the same was true of nearly everything in the category.

The interesting piece was the bit BackWeb called Polite. The client watched the network connection and only took bandwidth when the line was otherwise idle, backing off the moment the user did anything. Downloads happened in fragments over hours, invisibly, and only completed when nobody would notice. On a corporate WAN in 1998 this was the difference between a tolerable product and one that got uninstalled by the network administrator on a Monday morning.

~ the pivot ~

PointCast died of the collapse. BackWeb did not, because it stopped selling to consumers and started selling servers to companies that wanted to distribute software updates and internal bulletins to their own employees, with Fidelity and Bloomberg among the buyers. That business was real and it was small, and it never got anywhere near justifying what the company had raised.

The 2000s were fifteen years of that. Revenue shrank, headcount shrank, and the share price shrank until the stock had moved off NASDAQ and onto the over-the-counter market. What the company still had was the Polite patents, which described exactly the technique the whole industry had by then adopted for delivering software updates without anybody noticing.

~ the next chapter ~

In 2009 BackWeb sued Microsoft over four of those patents, naming BITS and Windows Update. Microsoft settled on 3 June 2010 and licensed the portfolio, paying a figure reported at around $2.1 million. BackWeb went after IBM and HP on similar grounds. This is the standard last act for a company with good engineering and no customers, and it is the only part of BackWeb's history that touched ordinary users, since by then the polite background download was running on every desktop on earth under a name that was not BackWeb's.

Then the assets ran out. The company suspended operations, sold the patents, and at an extraordinary general meeting in March 2014 the shareholders voted to wind it up and appointed Yoav Kfir as liquidator. Trading in the shares stopped on 8 November 2014. Roughly $10 million of cash was split across about 43.4 million shares, which came to about 22 cents each, paid out in two rounds across December 2014 and February 2015. The domain still answers, and what it serves is a parking page.

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