Round 2.0

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>


Just because the Internet hasn't yet ushered in a New Economy doesn't
mean it won't, the author says. He tells companies how to stay alert.

Round 2.0
-by Andy Lippman

The problem with likening the dot-com boom to the 17th-century Dutch
tulip insanity is that, now that the bust has come, many companies
think they can go back to sleep. To them, the threat is over:
Dot-coms did not generate a New Economy, they did not rewrite the
rules of business, life as we know it did not end. The fear that any
evanescent new idea would destroy the current mode of operating is
past.

Wrong. The challenge is not gone. It is just beginning.

Take some obvious examples:

ADVERTISING: The Internet was not an utterly new market for
advertising, nor doom for the industry. But...the industry has to
reinvent itself anyway.

Consider the new types of VCRs: TiVo and Replay. In my house, where
we only recently bought a TiVo, we have a new term: "TiVo-izing." We
TiVo-ize a live program by deliberately pausing it until we are far
enough behind real time that we can catch up by skipping commercials.
We do this both to watch a 22-minute program in 22 minutes and to
blow by the constant interruptions in the Olympics or Super Bowl.

How long will it be before everyone does that? Sure, there are only
300,000 TiVos and Replays out there, but do you think the threat will
evaporate? That's what the networks wished when cable started to take
hold in the 1970s. They dreamt of the day when every cable running
down every street in America turned to ash and the only way to get
television was through their transmitters. But it didn't happen. The
clock did not rewind. It took 20 years for the networks to be
crippled, but it was not a matter of direction for them; it was
simply a matter of time.

Will it take 20 years this time before everyone has a TiVo capability
in their set? I doubt it. The cost is marginally higher than for a
normal satellite tuner. The issue is not whether but when.

TELEPHONY: The old game is over. Time to move on to the next thing.

We will never pay any appreciable amount for phone calls again. If
you doubt this, despite all the recent carnage at phone companies,
look at the inventions that are going to destroy the notion of cell
towers as critical nodes and wirelines as the necessary last mile to
the home. One example: high-speed, wireless "Wi-Fi" technology, which
is based on hubs so inexpensive that they are being installed by
individuals and which is spreading like kudzu across the landscape.

Salvation does not lie in small steps to distinguish one phone
company's network from another. It lies in long-term, futuristic
ideas and new businesses.

We are entering an era characterized by communications among
distributed machines and dispersed people, rather than being mostly
about a connection between two individuals or between an individual
and a machine. The old approach to telephony was about "connections
to"; the next wave is about "connections among." Napster, instant
messaging, short message systems, and BlackBerries are examples.

This next wave will create new uses. There will, for instance, be
lots of "phones" without microphones, so your bus can send you a
short message saying when it will likely arrive at your station or so
a parking meter can let you know that its space is empty.

The difference is that no one will have a monopoly on how these
"connections among" are established, so competition will be fertile,
and companies will have to be smart if they are to make money.

<snip>

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