RW: Business (NOT) at the Speed of Thought

© Busakorn Pongparnit

Russell Wood writes: “20 years on from what at the time was regarded as such a ground-breaking read, heralding a new age in commerce, by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, it’s an appropriate time to wonder, how far have we come…? Remember those high and heady days, now known as the infamous dotcom bubble? A time of mania for all things Internet. Among the many catch-cries, there would no longer be travel agents, stock brokers or even banks. These were “non value adding intermediaries” who would be shed from the eco system as surplus baggage. The acronym generator went crazy… we had dot Coms, dot Cams and dot Bams, we had “stickiness” , “WAP”, started putting an “e” in front of everything and hallucinated our way into the “new economy” in the “web-based world”. Almost a full time job keeping up with the techno jargon. In Australia we even had mineral exploration company who overnight claimed they were becoming a “dotcom” and would now be “an internet business” whatever that meant.”