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The Bandwidth Dilemma: Coders vs. E-CEOs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the interesting-discussion-topic dept.

EMlNEM sent an interesting talking piece that's currently running on Cryptome. It's a look at some of Leadbeater's work and what the "new Internet" is and what it is supposed to be. Katz did a take on this recently called The Myth Of the Tech Slump, which IMHO, was much better.

1 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. The Internet failed? Or was it just dotcom mania? by SimplyCosmic · · Score: 5
    Against historical commonsense Leadbeater, a former Financial Times journalist, dates the "first Internet" from 1996 to 2000. Forget the twenty-five years or so year before the World Wide Web took off. Leadbeater is well aware of this forgery. He deliberately rewrites history, provoking the ASCII/Linux believers by saying that the Internet was born out of the dotcom spirit of e-commerce. What Leadbeater is pushing is what we may call New Voluntarism. Forget the hackers story of Internet rooted in military/academic informatics. Internet was born out of the Will to eBusiness. Shopping and entertainment are the true nature of humankind. They are the one and only source, engine and destiny of the Net.

    ...

    According to Leadbeater the "first Internet" failed because the technologists and geeks, in the end, triumphed over the CEOs and their managers and usability HTML slaves. Early online business pioneers were of good will, ready to serve their first customers. But the general audience got scared off by geekish hocus-pocus. Consumers, terrified by the complexity and clumsiness of this hyped-up yet incredibly self-referential environment simply left, way too early, never to come back again.

    So it didn't fail because people who rushed into being a dot.com with a plan no more complicated than "We want to make money online and fast, we don't care how". I failed because of all the geeks and nerds and their technology? Wow.

    Frankly, the idea that the Internet "failed" because pets.com didn't crush your local pet store is kind of silly. As a geek, the Internet is still chugging along nice for me. And even for my non-geek friends, the continued growth in websites for research papers and entertainment, communication through instant messengers and email, and online gaming galore, means that the Internet hasn't failed for them either.

    Maybe it's just my lack of business experience, but this author sounds like someone who's upset that eCommerce wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and now wants to create the "next big thing".