Cathedral and the Bazaar
Expect e-mail from the younger and older members of your extended family. - Amy S. Bruckman, assistant professor of computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology
What will be the top three qualities of successful Internet companies next year?
(1) Luck; (2) luck; (3) luck. - James Fallows, Industry Standard columnist and author of Breaking the News
(1) Enable employees to deal with customers directly, outside of any scripted control; (2) begin opening up at least parts of their intranets to public view and participation; (3) employ personalization technology to better understand and communicate with site visitors. - Christopher Locke
(1) Providing compelling online experiences for their customers; (2) being responsive, and then some, to customer service; (3) getting that it's the marketing (satisfying customer needs at a profit) that makes you a success, not the technology. - Donna Hoffman, codirector of the eLab at Vanderbilt University (dossier)'s Owen Graduate School of Management
(1) Keep promises made to customers, employees and the Street; (2) have a real understanding of the underlying lifetime value analyses behind the business; (3) be ahead of the consolidation curve. - Seth Godin, VP of direct marketing at Yahoo (YHOO) and the author of Permission Marketing
(1) Robustness (rather than speed); (2) rigorous affiliation with the customer (rather than e-merchandising); (3) laser focus (rather than department-store breadth). - Philip Evans, senior VP of Boston Consulting Group and coauthor of Blown to Bits
What Internet technology do you hope will be invented this year?
I want to be able to think text onto a screen. - Eric S. Raymond
A waterproof, lightweight laptop computer with wireless connectivity that I can take to the beach without worrying about getting sand in the keyboard or water in the circuits. - Roy T. Fielding
Streaming taste. - Larry Downes
The proliferation of [artificial intelligence-] based personal agents that will free me from having to "surf" the Web. - Don Tapscott, author of The Digital Economy and Growing Up Digital, and chairman of the Alliance for Converging Technologies
Better tools for creating, manipulating and deploying metadata. - Hal Varian, author of Information Rules and dean of the school of information management and systems at UC Berkeley
A transporter. For a networked society, we're spending too much time on planes. - Tara Lemmey
What won't happen in the Internet Economy in 2000?
The bubble won't burst. - Doc Searls, president of the Searls Group and coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto
Appliances will not collapse the PC market. Human beings like having their own computing power, their own disk space, their own territory. - Eric S. Raymond
Though many more people will have access to the Net, the digital divide won't be closed, because it has more to do with socioeconomic and educational inequality than simply whether one has access to the network. - Andrew Shapiro
Profit won't happen for anything business-to-consumer that isn't pure entertainment. - Adam Beberg, founder of Cosm, an open-source distributed computing project
Success within the same markets as 1999. Anyone seeking to repeat the successes of this past year should be looking at new markets and unforeseen opportunities. - Roy T. Fielding
What will be the next big idea for business-to-business e-commerce?
Accounting-to-accounting relationships. - Doc Searls
Cross-company "undernets." - Christopher Locke
Standardized product descriptions using XML. - Hal Varian
An industrywide data dictionary for MRO (the thousands of minor and irregular purchases that amount to a half-trillion dollars in industrial procurement). - Philip Evans
What will the customer of 2000 want?
Respect. Demand is in charge now, not supply. People on the demand side are not "eyeballs" any more. And they'll ignore you if you treat
