John McCrea has been a tremendous force at Silicon Graphics. He was able to rally the engineering and marketing people in the company around the Web, and he managed to build the WebFORCE product line into a rapidly growing business within the company. It is a tremendous success. John is definitely someone who sees the big picture and has a vision. He rallies people around him and makes things happen.

THE WEBMASTER (Kip Parent)

The Force

"At a technical level, VRML is a file format. At a higher level, it is a way of doing 3-D graphics over networks. 3-D graphics are coming to a Web where people have become comfortable with a page-centric view. But VRML will take the page-centric view and pop it into another dimension, with the potential to make the experience more like the physical world. This fundamental shift brings a sense of place to something that has absolutely evaporated the notion of space. While evaporation of space is a powerful concept, much of the information suddenly loses context. Introducing the notion of space to the Net via VRML has the potential to make it more compelling and appealing to a larger audience."

In early '95 John thrust Silicon Graphics into the Internet market with the WebFORCE server product line. Today he is manager of Cosmo, their next-generation Web software product line. "Who knows where that will lead to." he says. "I was the product manager for the Indy workstation, and the Web thing came on really strong. It was obvious that we had an opportunity, and I went forward and defined what we would do and pulled together the team that would build the first Web authoring tools and the first Web system. It has grown into a multi-hundred-million dollar business for us, in both servers and authoring workstations. I lead much of the business, and the marketing effort behind it, and I work with the engineering teams that are building the next generation of products."

JOHN McCREA is the manager of Cosmo, Silicon Graphics's next-generation Web software product line.