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Ideas to Watch

Trend of 2000	What's the biggest Internet Economy trend of 2000?
	Audience Power	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
	Projection	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
	No Such Thing	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
	Machine Processable	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
	Palmtop Shopping	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
	Dot Com-munity	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
	Valuation	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
	Location Independence	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
	Interconnections	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
	Linux Dominance	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
	E-Mail	Expect e-mail from the younger and older members of your extended family.	Amy S. Bruckman
Top Three Qualities of Success	What will be the top three qualities of successful Internet companies next year?
	Luck	(1) Luck; (2) luck; (3) luck.	James Fallows
	Customers	(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
	Experiences	(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
	Promises	(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
	Robustness	(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
Hoped for Invention	What Internet technology do you hope will be invented this year?
	Text to Screen	I want to be able to think text onto a screen.	Eric S. Raymond
	Lightweight Laptop	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	Streaming taste.	Larry Downes
	Personal Agents	The proliferation of [artificial intelligence-] based personal agents that will free me from having to "surf" the Web.	Don Tapscott
	Better Tools	Better tools for creating, manipulating and deploying metadata.	Hal Varian
	Transporter	A transporter. For a networked society, we're spending too much time on planes.	Tara Lemmey
What Won't Happen	What won't happen in the Internet Economy in 2000?
	Bubble Burst	The bubble won't burst.	Doc Searls
	Not Collapse	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
	Digital Divide	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	Profit won't happen for anything business-to-consumer that isn't pure entertainment.	Adam Beberg
	Success like 1999	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
Next Big Idea	What will be the next big idea for business-to-business e-commerce?
	Accounting	Accounting-to-accounting relationships.	Doc Searls
	Cross-company	Cross-company "undernets."	Christopher Locke
	XML	Standardized product descriptions using XML.	Hal Varian
	Data Dictionary	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 is Wanted?	What will the customer of 2000 want?
	Demand	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
	Integrated Experience	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
	Not Product, Place, Price or Promotion	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 threatens normal business	What threats do clicks-and-mortar businesses face that they don't know about yet?
	Benchmarking	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
	Lose People	They will lose their key people even faster in 2000.	Larry Downes
	Differences	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
	Business Webs	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
E-Commerce Models	What e-commerce business models will take hold in 2000?
	Next Day Delivery	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	Pay-for-performance revenue models will be huge.	Donna Hoffman
	TiVo WebTV	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
How to Foster Innovation	What's the best way for companies to foster innovation: acquire, invest, incubate from within, or some combination?
	Incubate	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
	Function-rich Infrastructure	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
	Separation	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
	Attitude	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
Impact of Globalization	How will the globalization of business change the way Internet companies compete?
	Fulfillment	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
	Venture Capitalists	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	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
Impact of Appliances	Will we see an online world centered on such devices as Internet appliances this year? If we are, what will it be like?
	Access Devices	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
	Activity	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
	Embedding	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
	Prevalence	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
	Cheaper Hardware	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
Impact of Always-on?	How will the rise of "always-on" connectivity change the way the average consumer interacts with the Internet?
	Not Conscious of Interaction	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
	Connection	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
	Threshold	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
	Casual and Convenient	It makes interaction more casual and more convenient, rather like the Star Trek "Computer!" commands.	Vint Cerf
Impact on Video / Audio	Even with advances in video and audio technology, the Internet is largely a words-on-screen interface. Will that change substantially in 2000?
	Words Have Advantages	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
	Map to Thoughts	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	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
	Waste of Resources	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
Privacy Threats	What future privacy threats should people start to think about now?
	Location profiling	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
	Digital Certificates	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
Self-governance	Will self-governance work in the near-term?
	Only Option	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 misnomer	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?	How can government help rather than hurt the development of the Net?
	Lawmakers and Officials can...	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
	Innovation	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