Fergus Cassidy

Hertz and minds

WITH this column rapidly closing in on its third birthday, I was nostalgically looking back over the first columns I wrote back on that other planet called 2000. The brave new world of the internet seemed to be imploding then and spewing out hot gas and a lot of hot air.

This is now a piece of orphaned history dispatched to the dustbin of memory. To this day, no one has really been able to understand and explain the rise and fall of the New Economy. How could it have been possible for major companies and corporations, filled with expertise - or the capital to get it - to spend trillions based on the nebulous promises of internet technology? Blind faith?

Most certainly not. Speculative? Yes, to the degree that there were those who saw a jackpot opportunity for riding a bubble but knowing the right time to jump off. With the Nasdaq recently getting a pat on the back for its 30% rise since March of this year, the curtain has been lowered on that period of the commercialisation of the net. It's as if it never happened. The scaling back of investment, lay-offs regrouping and recouping, are all signs that the great internet gold rush unearthed few nuggets and plenty of rush. To the exits.

The rise and fall of the New Economy happened in a very brief period of time. Although back in 2000 there was no fall in sight, a bit wobbly maybe but the paradigm shift of new technology still had the industrial world in its grasp. Commentators were falling over each other to even explain the meaning of the word paradigm.

The internet would disintermediate. It would disrupt. It would turn everything on its head. Language changed to acknowledge new words and retire the old and hackneyed ones. Virtual became virtuous and prefixing words with and 'e' started a campaign to save the other letters of the alphabet.

Here's a list of some long forgotten paradigm words and the year they received the dictionary seal of approval: e-book (1992); e-money (1993); e-zine (1994); e-cash (bless) (1994); e-shopping (1994); e-trading (1995); e-industry (1996). Ecommerce (1997) and ebusiness (1998) are both still alive and kicking, distincing themselves from other family relatives by dropping the hyphen.

(At this point I should 'fess up to the fact that I dithered over the name of this column because of the 'e', but was won over by the Greeks and the geeks.)

Looking back, the commercialisation of the internet took place amidst a closet full of cultural skeletons haunting history since the Second World War. Played out with the Cold War certainties of death v communism, good v evil, left v right as the backdrop to context.

The land where the net originated was reeling with the schism of war, this time in Vietnam. Massively spending its way to the top of the space race winners podium, the United States had spooned science and technology into the mouths of a new demographic bubble called The Youth.

Long after the Soviet Union was vanquished to also-rans, science and technology ploughed on in the US and started to work on the now ubiquitous personal computer and networking technology. Universities in particular. And it was in such fermenting ideological hot houses that politics and technology intermingled and sprouted roots.

Once the potential of linking computers together was realised, the military grabbed what it needed and the rest was handed over to the scientific and academic communities where is was nurtured by the National Science Foundation. At one point, the networking idea was offered for sale to America's postal service. It declined the offer, as it was working on its own version of electronic mail, where the mail would be printed out and then delivered by post!

Resting in the bosom of academia for so long, it was understandable that there should be tears and fears over allowing commerce on to the networks. Maybe the fact the two most important technical protocols, TCP/IP and HTTP, had been put into the public domain, eased the resistance that did exist toward commercialisation.

But because of the Cold War and its chilling effects on political diversity, the smell of left v right sulphur still lingered in the air - even in the mid-1990s. The left were labelled as idealists, dreamers, hippies, geeks and hackers and the right were called visionaries, digerati, etrenpreneurs and eventurists. Even the gurus switched sides.

The historical baggage burst open the moment the net was commercialised, summed up in the title of Eric Raymond's excellent The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Or the Whole Earth Lectric List collective and its WELL fare. Even the manner in which the first three top level domains were conjured up illustrates this. Only one, .com, was for commerce, .org was for non-commercial or non-profit and .net was for network analysis, testing and maintenance.

Commercialisation was always going to be a titanic war of words between two supposedly opposite and conflicting standpoints. There may have been no business model to work from but there sure was a political one.

And yet in the end both 'sides' found a new form of unity, previously not seen. Both were convinced that the internet would change everything. Of how people live, how they vote, how they communicate or learn. And of how centuries old ways of doing business and analysing economics would be pushed aside. Both were wrong.

Maybe commerce did view the net with old glasses. Equating it with previous media streams like radio and television and desperate to turn the net into yet another sales channel. That strategy failed spectacularly and not from want of trying. It was so spectacular that even the 'other side' was silenced by the demise. No whistling past the graveyard.

Commerce is beginning to settle down on the net. Those who can - sell. Those who can't are getting on with increasing productivity and leveraging income by using the net.

One of the great ironies of all is that business is now one of the new champions of standardisation. Interoperability is the new mantra of corporate culture. Getting software to link to other software and transferring oceans of resulting data around the office and around the globe.

Standards are also emblazoned on the crest of the 'old school' with its "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code".

The fantastic part of all this is that we now know how amazingly durable and flexible this internet thing really is. If it can withstand the heat of a political battle that's been waged for almost fifty years, the chances are it can withstand anything.

So here's to the future. In particular the next two weeks of it and my holidays. I've detected tiredness and am routing around it.