Ideas to Watch

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 24 Jan 2000 14:00:00 -0800

The future isn't what it used to be. While it's fun to noodle over the shape of the wired world years from now, most of us are lucky if we can envision what we're going to eat for lunch. That's why The Standard asked 20 Internet experts what they thought the Internet Economy would produce over just the next year, in areas like e-commerce, technology, policy and business strategy. In the real world, you'd pay a pretty penny for this kind of advice. So sit back and enjoy the show. - Mickey Butts

What's the biggest Internet Economy trend of 2000?

The rising power of the audience. Online audiences tend to be much savvier than their offline counterparts, and are much less tolerant of traditional advertising and branding campaigns. The disparity between companies that are clueful or clueless in this respect will become glaringly obvious, and will begin to cause substantial shifts in market share. - Christopher Locke, coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto and editor of Entropy Gradient Reversals

Take every number from Forrester, Gartner and Jupiter, add them, multiply by two, and you'll have accurate predictions. That's not just a trend, it's my investment model. - Larry Downes, e-business consultant and coauthor of Unleashing the Killer App

There won't be any such thing as an "Internet company" as we've come to know it. All companies that want to add value to the marketplace will evolve into Internet companies. - Evan I. Schwartz, author of Webonomics and Digital Darwinism

The next decade will see, I hope, the arrival of data (such as catalogs, weather, stock prices) that will be processable and combinable by machine. It'll be the rebirth of knowledge representation, where human meets machine. At last it will be a chance for a search engine to figure out the real, logical answer to a question instead of drowning you in wild guesses. - Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium and author of Weaving the Web

The most significant change will take place when people can conveniently use a palmtop computer to search for products online, compare prices and negotiate optional features while walking around normal retail establishments. - Roy T. Fielding, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, creator of the latest version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and a doctoral candidate at the University of California (dossier), Irvine

If 1999 was the year of the dot-com, 2000 will be the year of the dot- community. Grassroots sites based on shared values and common interests will steal market share from the big portals. - Andrew Shapiro, author of The Control Revolution, director of the Aspen Institute Internet Policy Project and a senior adviser to the Markle Foundation

Dot-coms and e-businesses will be valued on the number of repeat customers, the lifetime value of those customers and the retention rate of those customers. Internet advertising revenues will be based on customer acquisition bounties and transaction fees, not eyeballs or click-throughs. - Patricia Seybold, CEO of the Patricia Seybold Group and author of Customers.com

True location independence for people. Wireless [connections] will allow for physical products - be they packages or pizzas - to be tied to you and your moving coordinates. - Tara Lemmey, president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Weaving the right interconnections between the Internet Economy and the plain old economy will become increasingly crucial. Success, in many arenas, will depend upon finding the right mixes of networks and software, brick-and-mortar facilities, and transportation. - William Mitchell, dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (dossier)'s School of Architecture and Planning and author of e-Topia and City of Bits

Linux and other open-source software will dominate server computing and make serious inroads into the appliance and desktop markets. The Microsoft (MSFT) monopoly will crumble. - Eric S. Raymond, pioneer in the open-source movement and author of The 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 them like body parts. - Doc Searls

An integrated customer experience: Browse and comparison-shop online, buy in the physical store; browse and purchase online, return mistakes at the physical store; browse the physical store, including the Web from the store, then buy it online at the store kiosk and pick it up at the store. All the various combinations of the above. - Donna Hoffman

The four "p"s of marketing are dead. Rather than products, customers value experiences. Rather than place, they will create relationships in the marketspace or the clicks-and-bricks interface - the "marketface." Prices can no longer be defined by sellers with the new price-discovery mechanisms. And promotion is being replaced by the forging of interactive relationships. - Don Tapscott

What threats do clicks-and-mortar businesses face that they don't know about yet?

The benchmarking that goes on online is ruthless. You don't have to be the best in your neighborhood; you have to be best in the world. - Seth Godin

They will lose their key people even faster in 2000. - Larry Downes

Because real-world and Internet marketing techniques differ radically, these companies will run into the problem of sending mixed messages: one style of communications via broadcast media, and another via the Web. Increasingly, these markets overlap, and the overlapping elements of both will become either confused or angry. - Christopher Locke

The threats posed by unforeseen "business webs," enabled by changes in the regulatory regimes. For instance, if regulations prohibiting manufacturers from selling cars directly to consumers in the United States are repealed, what's to stop a first-tier supplier from manufacturing an exclusive CarPoint or CarsDirect vehicle that consumers order, configure and buy on the Web, and take to a business partner like Midas (MDS) for service and maintenance? - Don Tapscott

What e-commerce business models will take hold in 2000?

Net customers will no longer be satisfied with two-day or next-day delivery. They'll frequent outlets that can deliver an order placed in the morning that afternoon. - Patricia Seybold

Pay-for-performance revenue models will be huge. - Donna Hoffman

I think that we'll see a growing market for Replay/TiVo/WebTV technologies that will provide an interesting infrastructure for TV-based e-commerce. - Hal Varian

What's the best way for companies to foster innovation: acquire, invest, incubate from within, or some combination?

Incubate from within. Many companies already have tremendous talent, but they're sitting on it, preventing people from doing what they want to do. - Christopher Locke

None of the above. Because the Net provides a function-rich infrastructure, transaction costs between business entities are plummeting, enabling companies to acquire resources without owning them. - Don Tapscott

Start with a high measure of separation: new people, new entities, new business models. Then do a reverse takeover: Give the best of the innovators pillaging rights to the old-line assets. Omit the first, and you will never escape the chill hand of organizational conservatism. Omit the second, and you throw away your only competitive advantage. - Philip Evans

Create an attitude - from the top and the bottom - that "zooming" (the art of embracing the new) is the only way. Too many Net companies zoomed with one good idea, but are now stuck by their success. They've become the companies they worked so hard to replace. - Seth Godin

How will the globalization of business change the way Internet companies compete?

It will bring fulfillment to center stage. Information may flow freely across the world, but things are still stuck in old-world economics. Local fulfillment for offshore information-centric companies will be a huge opportunity. - Philip Evans

U.S. venture capitalists will multiply their funding of local companies in Europe, Asia and developing countries. But we will find that language and cultural differences will emerge as a big barrier to cross-border commerce over the Net. Only local companies, or U.S. companies highly adapted to the local environment, will thrive. - Evan I. Schwartz

Globalization pressure will not come from First World countries, or even from emergent Third World countries, but rather from a kind of digital Fourth World represented by the explosive proliferation of the Web itself. - Christopher Locke

Will we see an online world centered on such devices as Internet appliances this year? If we are, what will it be like?

There will be different sizes and shapes of access devices, and the Web will have to be engineered so that it is just as accessible from any of them. - Tim Berners-Lee

Where people should expect more Internet activity is in the simplification of existing communication products: games and e-mail. Enhancing games with more Internet features will be the norm. Likewise, special e-mail units that simply plug in to the phone or cable TV system, at a price point near that of regular phones, will become the primary access method by the end of 2000. - Roy T. Fielding

Increasingly, intelligence and telecommunication capacity will be embedded in a wide range of everyday objects and devices. We will not think we're going online or interacting with computers when we use these devices; it will just seem [like] our everyday surroundings are more intelligently responsive to our needs. - William Mitchell

The first prevalent things will be set-top boxes and cell phones on the Internet, then more automobile Internet-enabling technology will show up, then much more wireless. - Vint Cerf, senior VP of Internet architecture and technology at MCI WorldCom and a developer of TCP/IP

The desktop will migrate to cheaper hardware that is cost-competitive with (and coexists with) supplementary special-purpose hardware like PDAs and Web toasters. - Eric S. Raymond

How will the rise of "always-on" connectivity change the way the average consumer interacts with the Internet?

Most of the time, we will not even be conscious that we're interacting with the Internet, just as we're not particularly conscious of interacting with the electrical supply grid. - William Mitchell

It will mean that most people will at last be able to use the Net under the same assumptions as the academics who spread it: that a computer is constantly connected and can send a packet whenever it wants. It will mean we will want our computers to be instantly on so that we can push an icon and get the weather within a second. - Tim Berners-Lee

It lowers the threshold of how valuable a site has to be in order for people to visit it. The always- on model is more forgiving in what a site must offer to get your attention; it just takes a second to go there and see if anything is new. This should produce a more varied Net niche culture. - James Fallows

It makes interaction more casual and more convenient, rather like the Star Trek "Computer!" commands. - Vint Cerf

Even with advances in video and audio technology, the Internet is largely a words-on-screen interface. Will that change substantially in 2000?

It won't. Words have compelling advantages over point-and-click; they're a much richer mode of communication. And communication, of course, is what the Internet is about. - Eric S. Raymond

Nothing will replace words, as they map to thoughts so well. I see the future as a wide range of media from pure text (may it live forever) to the wildest 3D and live video media. - Tim Berners-Lee

Words and images on screen are the most efficient way to transfer information. Entertainment will continue to occur in appliances. The computer may become part of the TV, but the TV will not become part of the computer. - Adam Beberg

It is a waste of resources to use the Internet as a broadcast medium. What will change is better control of traditional communication channels through the Internet, such that a browser control panel can "tune in," or record in advance of viewing, specific broadcasts over a traditional medium. - Roy T. Fielding

What future privacy threats should people start to think about now?

Location-based profiling: cars, cell phones and other wireless devices that allow their location-specific information to be combined with other personal data. And biometrics: The real question in 2000 is who owns your identity and your wake. - Tara Lemmey

People should think about how increasingly ubiquitous digital certificates, depending on their design and use, can cause us to reveal more information than we intend. - Andrew Shapiro

Will self-governance work in the near-term?

It has to, since it's all we have. It's just a question of which "self" is acting through which mechanism of collective "governance." Is it industry regulating itself through best practices and codes of conduct? Or Internet users shaping the network through new global entities such as ICANN? Or citizens governing themselves through traditional lawmaking? In different circumstances, different forms of self-governance will be appropriate, but all must be responsive to public needs. - Andrew Shapiro

Self-governance is a misnomer. This period is one of testing. Not testing self-governance, but testing systems. The question will be to see where these systems have failures and how to shore them up either within the system or via technical and legal frameworks. - Tara Lemmey

How can government help rather than hurt the development of the Net?

Lawmakers and government officials can - if they act carefully - protect consumers, preserve competition, safeguard fundamental rights and ensure that the benefits of the Internet reach as many people as possible. If they don't, it's doubtful that anyone else will. - Andrew Shapiro

By continuing to open the path for innovation - not just technical innovation but business and governance innovation - I think we'll find the courts leading in making sure we don't allow old thinking and models to get in the way of advancement, as well as [making sure] we don't let new models infringe on important rights. - Tara Lemmey

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Ideas to Watch