The Internet didn’t just grow between 1997 and 2006; it exploded.

Startups rocketed to IPOs. The dot-com bubble burst. SaaS was born. Open source entered the enterprise. The browser became the new operating system.

In Vol. 3 of our anniversary series, Ken Wasch revisits the decade when the Internet went supernova, and the CODiE Awards recognized the companies shaping what would become the modern tech economy.

Salesforce. PayPal. Webex. Blackboard. Akamai Technologies.

Some were early disruptors. Some survived the crash. All helped redefine software.

The CODiEs didn’t just follow the iindustry;they documented its turning points.

Third in a series of five.

If the 1987–1996 era was about the birth of the modern software industry, then 1997–2006 was the period when the whole world jumped in. The Web went from novelty to necessity, startups went from garages to IPOs, open source escaped the basement, and enterprise software became the backbone of global business. The CODiEs—always the industry’s seismograph—vibrated wildly during these ten years.

This was the decade when everything changed fast…and sometimes broke even faster.

1997–1999: “Welcome to the Web”

By 1997, the Web was no longer a charming science project. It was the future, and everyone felt it.

CODiE categories exploded in number:

Best Internet Commerce Solution, Best Web Publishing Tool, Best Web Service, Best Online Consumer Information Product, Best Hosted Application—these were brand-new ideas.

Some early winners defined the era:

• Macromedia Dreamweaver 1.0 – 1998 CODiE Winner, Best Web Authoring Tool
• Microsoft FrontPage 98 – 1999 CODiE Winner, Best Web Site Creation Tool
• E*TRADE from Morgan Stanley Online Brokerage – 1998 CODiE Winner, Best Online Financial Service
• Akamai FreeFlow – 1999 CODiE Winner, Best Internet Infrastructure Service

Akamai, then still a tiny MIT spin-off, was pioneering what would become the global content-delivery network industry. Dreamweaver, built by a young Macromedia team, would become the defacto standard for web design.

Meanwhile, the companies that had shaped the 1980s and early 1990s—Broderbund, Sierra, MECC—were being absorbed, merged, or outpaced by nimbler web-native firms. The landscape was resetting.

The Dot-Com Eruption and the First SaaS Seeds (1999–2001)

The dot-com boom didn’t just reshape software—it reshaped the CODiEs themselves. Entirely new kinds of companies started winning awards:

• Salesforce – 2001 CODiE Winner, Best Hosted Application (years before “SaaS” was a widely used term)
• Webex Meeting Center – 2001 CODiE Winner, Best Collaboration Product
• Google Search – 2001 Finalist, an early sign of the tidal wave to come
• PayPal – 2002 CODiE Winner, Best Financial Service (still a startup at the time)

This was the beginning of “the browser as the platform.”

The CODiEs were early to recognize these cloud pioneers, long before enterprise IT took them seriously. The judges could sense the shift: software wasn’t something you installed anymore—software was something you visited.

When Everything Broke (2000–2002)

The crash came hard. Startups vanished, venture capital dried up, and many CODiE categories saw fewer entrants. But this thinning of the herd revealed which companies were built to last.

Two products won CODiEs during the crash years and went on to reshape entire industries:

• Intuit TurboTax Online – 2002 CODiE Winner, Best Online Service
• Blackboard – 2001 and 2002 CODiE Winner, Best Education Platform

While Pets.com became a punchline, education technology and online financial management quietly established themselves as durable, long-term sectors.

The CODiEs captured the pivot perfectly: hype fell away, substance endured.

2003–2006: The Rise of Web 2.0 and the Return of Innovation

By 2003 the internet had sobered up, rebuilt its foundations, and was ready for its second act. Social platforms, dynamic websites, broadband, RSS, AJAX, tagging, user-generated content—Web 2.0 was on the move, and CODiE categories evolved to capture the zeitgeist.

Some emblematic CODiE winners from the era:

Software Development & Open Source

• MySQL Database – 2003 CODiE Winner, Best Database Solution
• Eclipse IDE – 2004 CODiE Winner, Best Developer Tool
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux – 2004 CODiE Winner, Best Operating System

What began in hobbyist circles was now winning enterprise awards.

Enterprise & Collaboration

• WebEx Office – 2004 CODiE Winner, Best Collaboration Tool
• Business Objects XI – 2005 CODiE Winner, Best Business Intelligence Product
• Siebel CRM OnDemand – 2005 CODiE Winner, Best CRM Solution

Consolidation defined this era—Oracle would later buy Siebel, SAP would buy Business Objects, and Cisco would acquire WebEx.

Consumer Internet & Media

• Intuit TurboTax Online – 2004 CODiE Winner, Best Consumer Web Service
• Rhapsody Music Service – 2004 CODiE Winner, Best Digital Media Service
• Audible.com – 2005 CODiE Winner, Best Online Content Service

Media was quietly undergoing its own revolution: streaming, downloads, and digital distribution were beginning to overshadow boxed software.

Meanwhile… a Little Thing Called Mobility Begins

It’s easy to forget that the mobile revolution didn’t begin with the iPhone in 2007—it began creeping into the CODiEs years earlier:

• Palm OS Applications regularly won late-1990s and early-2000s categories
• BlackBerry Enterprise Server earned a 2006 CODiE for Best Mobile Application
• Handmark PocketMoney and Documents To Go were small-company winners that would foreshadow the app-economy future

Mobile wasn’t the star yet—but it was learning its lines backstage.

The Industry at 2006: The World Has Shifted

By the end of 2006, the software industry looked nothing like the world the CODiEs entered in the 1980s:

• The Web was the dominant software delivery platform
• SaaS had moved from curiosity to inevitability
• Search, online payments, collaboration, and mobile email were becoming utilities
• Enterprise vendors were consolidating into giants
• Open-source tools were being adopted by Fortune 500 companies
• Consumer software was pivoting from shrink-wrapped boxes to digital services

And the CODiEs had documented each turn of the wheel.

This was the decade when software leapt fully into the cloud, the browser became the primary interface, and small companies—Salesforce, Google, MySQL, PayPal—made their first public claims to destiny in the CODiE spotlight.

The industry was about to enter its next transformation, and the CODiEs were already setting up the stage.