Great Bridge

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

~ the goodbye ~

In May 2000, Landmark Communications, a media conglomerate in Norfolk, Virginia that owned newspapers and would later own The Weather Channel, started a software company. The plan was to do for PostgreSQL what Red Hat had done for Linux: take a mature piece of free software that enterprises were nervous about, wrap it in support contracts and a phone number, and sell the confidence rather than the code. They called it Great Bridge and gave it the tagline "The Open Source Database Experts".

The hiring was the serious part. Great Bridge put several of the people who actually wrote PostgreSQL on its payroll, including Bruce Momjian as VP of Database Development, and its own closing statement claimed it had assembled "the industry's deepest talent pool of PostgreSQL expertise". The claim holds up. For a stretch in 2000 and 2001, a newspaper company in coastal Virginia was quietly paying the salaries of core contributors to a database that would go on to run a serious fraction of the internet.

It shipped. The first commercially distributed version of PostgreSQL came out of Great Bridge, along with a development community at greatbridge.org that hosted more than a hundred Postgres-related projects. FORTUNE named it to a list of the 25 Coolest Global Companies. The software was downloaded about 19,000 times and the documentation about 40,000 times, and that ratio is the whole problem in two numbers: twice as many people wanted the manual as wanted the vendor. By July 2001 the board had started looking for more money or a buyer, and found neither.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the letter on the front page ~

The archive caught it. On 17 September 2001 the whole of greatbridge.com is a single page of 1,844 bytes under the old title, and the body is the press release, dateline "NORFOLK, Va., September 6, 2001". The headline runs "Great Bridge ceases operations", subtitled "Open source pioneer closes after failing to identify a qualified investor or acquirer". That dateline is worth noting, because the trade coverage is filed a day later and the company's own words put the announcement on the sixth.

Frank Batten Jr., the Landmark chairman who founded it, gets the only quote, and it is unusually direct for the genre. He says the board remained convinced that open source and PostgreSQL in particular were viable for business computing, and then: "The board was not convinced that, given the current economic climate, the company could generate revenues at a level to meet the required expenses of the business within the company's funding horizon." The release ends by noting that a limited number of employees would stay on to manage the closure, gives [email protected] as the contact, and then points the reader at www.postgresql.org for ongoing work. A dying commercial vendor signing off by sending you to the free project is a tidier gesture than most companies manage.

By 29 November 2001 the domain answered 404. Today it redirects to an unrelated real-estate site.

~ what the 25 coolest list did not price in ~

Great Bridge opened in May 2000, two months after the NASDAQ peak, and spent its entire existence inside the downslope. Sixteen months is not enough time to build an enterprise sales pipeline for a database, which is a product people adopt on five-year horizons and change roughly never. The company needed customers who would bet a production system on a vendor younger than their last hardware refresh, during the worst year for technology spending in two decades.

The thing that makes it a genuinely odd grave is that the bet was right and the timing was the only thing wrong with it. PostgreSQL did become the enterprise-credible open database. The commercial-support-for-free-software model did work, and EnterpriseDB has been selling roughly the Great Bridge proposition for twenty years. Great Bridge simply tried it first and ran out of runway while the market was still deciding.

~ the inheritance ~

Nothing was lost, which is unusual for this site. The code was never Great Bridge's to lose, the contributors went back to the community or to other employers, and the project continued without a hiccup. What the closure cost, in Momjian's reading at the time, was the marketing muscle: for sixteen months PostgreSQL had a company making noise about it in the enterprise press, and then it did not again for years.

I use PostgreSQL. It is the default database for most things I build, and it has been for a long time. I had never heard of Great Bridge until I went looking for it, which is the ordinary condition of infrastructure: you get handed the software and never hear about the company that failed trying to sell it. In 2001 I was seventeen and in Turkey and about a year from my first serious programming, and a Virginia newspaper company's failed database venture was never going to reach me. The software reached me instead, free, with no idea that anybody had once tried to charge for it.

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