The recent Nasdaq hiccup should have proved, even to daytraders, that e-commerce companies without rational profitability timelines might not deserve $2 billion market caps.
Perhaps what we created wasn't the new economy so much as the dysfunctional economy, in which short-term rewards are associated with the inability to concentrate (highly touted e-companies unsure of whether they're b-to-b storefronts or wireless vertical affinity portals or some other trendy business model) and delusions of grandeur (one clever Perl script and a cool name does not a profitable company make). Expect the psychiatric community to add Internet-executive disorder to its list of potential diagnoses.
Now that the inevitable bloodletting and consolidation is accelerating, it's reasonable to wonder publicly what many have mused in private for some time: Maybe the purpose of the Net isn't to buy and sell things.
I realize that positing such a question goes against all those business magazines you have stacked in the recycle pile. And it is true that the best online shopping is as frictionless as commerce can be.
This questioning of the Net's purpose isn't limited to the nonprofit community or Larry Ellison wannabes whose options are so far under water that they'll never see sunlight without getting the bends. Surely, these hardened idealists note, sharing or purchasing trivial material like stock tips, pornography and 'N Sync outtakes isn't why Tim Berners-Lee proposed this infrastructure. Early Net companies had names like Progressive Networks; lining their pockets wasn't the only reason these wizards hacked out code and business plans so many late nights. You can see that tradition in projects like SETIatHome, in which people devote their idling processors to the search for extraterrestrials. You could argue that the Net community might want to work to solve earthbound issues first, but it's a noble attempt.
Back before you couldn't get any useful information without giving DoubleClick (DCLK) some impressions, professionals used the Net to share research. Aside from offering a sense of community to geographically disparate people with similar interests, a notion picked up by most successful Net businesses, it was a huge time-saver. For example, academic journals have a glacial lead time. It can well be more than a year before a submitted article turns into a published one, which means that someone doing research along parallel lines could work many months and not know that similar or disproving research is on its way. Via Usenet, an information medium long since taken over by spammers, the Net made it easier for researchers to learn much earlier what was happening in their respective fields.
Right now, the most important research going on is in biotechnology. Multiple groups are racing to map the human genome; new gene-related therapies are being developed and tested at a breakneck pace; and all these projects and advancements are dependent on what others have done before or are doing simultaneously. Not only do these teams have to assimilate all that has come before, but they also have to be aware of what their colleagues and competitors are doing. There's a huge financial incentive to cross the finish line first with new drugs and treatments, but there's also an understanding (among the researchers, if not always among the business execs) that many of the ongoing projects depend on what's discovered via other projects. Sharing information over the Net is the most effective way for this diverse community to come together.
The Net gives biotech professionals, like professionals in any field, the means to collaborate quickly and cheaply. Companies like Healtheon/WebMD (HLTH) and the ailing Drkoop.com are betting that these biotech advances will translate into e-commerce opportunities, but right now the T3 lines uniting researchers worldwide are transmitting more data and ideas than business plans.
Is the astonishing Net period that now appears to be ending merely the opening act for biotech? Might biotech, not e-commerce, be the industry's killer app? No one can know for sure. But the underlying
