Underwriting such giant, risky projects often falls to governments and other large institutions that can hedge them against other investments. But governments are fickle partners, and the projects' fortunes wax and wane with every minor adjustment in both local and international political climates. Countries that complain the project is harmful to their economic interests may be plotting all along to capture the profits when everyone else is too exhausted to stop them.
Unfortunately, con men also find big projects irresistible. As a result, the public is often drawn in too soon and on the worst financial terms. Project delays lead inexperienced investors to demand accelerated returns, which further delays profitability and threatens the project with collapse. Frequent panics, booms and busts dog the effort from beginning to end. The media throws fuel on all the ups and downs, doting on each misstep and gleefully predicting total failure right up until the moment of victory.
Over the past five years we have been working on our own global infrastructure project, the construction of a kind of virtual canal. Built on a platform of cheap computing power and the Internet's open networking standards, its goal is to connect one end of the supply chain to the other - from producers all the way to consumers - so that data can flow freely along with the transactions they describe. Like the Suez, it promises to speed the flow of goods, improve productivity and - not incidentally - make its builders wealthy.
But like the Suez and other engineering marvels, the Internet has failed to deliver on the early promise touted by its arrogant creators. Our new infrastructure is plagued by technological delays of its own, as well as its share of crooked promoters and media overexposure. Anxious regulators threaten its existence, and disappointed investors, insisting on profits before they can be delivered, have crippled its development. The public-private partnership that has managed its development so far appears to be breaking down, leaving everyone with claims to being the legitimate toll collector.
Winning the Internet revolution is not, of course, the same as digging a ditch through a hundred miles of desert. The Suez is too small to handle a new generation of supertankers and faces obsolescence. But the Internet was designed to function even after a nuclear holocaust, and it can expand its bandwidth as quickly as new technologies are invented. Our project has not one but an army of designers, from professional systems architects down to individual users experimenting with it. Unlike Ferdinand de Lesseps, we don't even know exactly what it is we are building, and because we have been using our new infrastructure from the very first day of its construction, we may never know when it is actually finished. Without thousands of workers and massive reshaping of a landscape, most of us may not even realize that our efforts are part of an infrastructure project in the first place.
That's a dangerous blind spot, leading many companies and investors to see the collapse of the Nasdaq as proof that the revolution is over. Time now to salvage the millions of dollars spent on hardware, software and communications gear during the orgy. "With Internet exuberance barely cold in the grave," begins this year's Business Week Info Tech 100 Report, "a far more sobering period has arrived: the era of efficiency."
Don't believe it. The work continues, inching its way through the most unforgiving terrain and intractable design challenges, falling further into debt but still alive. Give up on it and you will wake up one day to find yourself standing alone in an empty port, waiting for your ships to return.
Larry Downes is a strategy consultant and co-author of Unleashing the Killer App. John Castro provided research assistance for this column.
