E-Shoppers Are Now E-Spenders

"It seems that the virtual world's top retailers are succeeding because they've learned the simple and time-honored tradition of keeping their customers satisfied. The idea is straightforward -- at least in concept: Provide a good experience consistently, and buyers will keep coming back. 'What defines a retailer is how well it serves a meaningful group of customers,' says Ken Seiff, chief executive of online fashion retailer Bluefly."

Tech Bloom in full flower

"When the markets crashed and the money steamed from high-tech like coolant from a blown radiator, most of us made a logical assumption: The engine of technological innovation was shot and things would settle down and act normal. If this is normal, I don't want to meet weird. In basements, garages and the empty warehouses that once held the Next Big Thing, tech-savvy folks are huddled over their laptops, working together online to give away the future. The result? We're seeing a surge of technological creativity that easily trumps anything we dreamed of with the dot-com PR guys crooning in our ears."

Fiber to the People

"Burlington, Vermont, is building a network. Like many municipalities across North America, it has decided to construct an advanced fiber network on its own. The AFN is being deployed first to support city services. Then, as part of the four-phase project, this municipality of just 40,000 will extend blazingly fast Internet service to businesses and residences. To many, this just looks like more socialism from Vermont. Why should government be in the business of providing high-speed networks? Isn't that what free markets are for? Haven't we all learned that the market is more efficient at supplying goods and services? Do we really need to rediscover the failings of Karl Marx at 100 megabits per second?

The answer, as Cornell economist Alan McAdams argues, has nothing to do with Karl Marx and everything to do with basic economics. AFNs are natural monopolies. That doesn't mean that there can be only one, but rather that if there is one, then it is far cheaper to simply add customers to the one than to build another. The electricity grid in a local neighborhood is a good example of a natural monopoly. Sure, we could run four wires to every home, but do we really need four electricity companies serving every home?"

Bill Gates: Unplugged

"At the semantic level, we actually now have standards. That's been a holy grail for over 20 years. People spent a lot of time futzing around getting the bits to flow between machines and now that we have that, you think, 'Well I can point a browser at any Web site. Why can't I do a query about all the sellers?' The reason you can't is because that's at a higher semantic level than just how to put the stuff on the screen. And it's far more complex. Only Web services give us a foundation for us to do that, so in a sense, a lot of the dreams of the '90s, like true e-commerce, had to wait for this industry standard infrastructure and the tools to be put in place."

The Triumph of Good Enough

"The rise of converged devices will have a huge impact on operators. More functionality in devices at the edge of the network makes it harder to monetize the network in the middle. My Treo is technically a SprintPCS phone, but I don't view it that way any more than I think my laptop belongs to Comcast, my home broadband provider. With voice-over-IP, WiFi, number portability and the inevitable unbundling of phones and wireless networks, operators will get retain even less control. Multi-year contracts and SIM locks will only hold back the tide so long.


Where the Money Will Be


In the new world, the money will be in applications on the edge devices, hardware sales, and of all things, dumb connectivity. The first wireless operator to execute the Dell/Wal-Mart model -- being the efficient commodity provider, with a great brand -- will make a killing. (Partly because they will kill their competitors.) Not that this is an easy task. Legacy billing systems and legacy culture are huge hurdles to overcome, and the ideas of 'owning the customer' and 'delivering value-added services' are deeply embedded in operator DNA."

We've had Napster since 1909, and the sky still hasn't fallen

"In 1909, residents of Wilmington, DE, were able to subscribe to an online music service that piped phonograph recordings over their telephone lines and through loudspeakers. 1909 was one year after the sheet music publishers were told to get bent by Congress: see, they'd grown alarmed at the prevalance of unauthorized piano rolls and had asked the Congress for a Broadcast-Flag-like regime that would let them veto any new music tech that would endanger their business (like online music delivery), making it illegal. Congress told them to get lost. Good thing we rescued those idiots from themselves back in 1908 -- can you imagine a music industry where the most lucrative product in the market was sheet music?"

Net-working

"The next generation of hirees is the Net Generation, and they may force companies to rethink the relationship between employer and employee. Companies will have to plug into flexibility and openness if they want to tap the talents of the best and the brightest of the Net Generation. Young people who have grown up with the Internet balk at curbs on the free flow of information and that, experts believe, means companies will have to rethink how they treat their employees."