Tomorrow.net: don't think about the Internet as technology. Think about it as the future of your business - Chief Executive Guide: Beyond the Internet - includes glossary of terms

Chief Executive, The, March 15, 1999 by Keith Ferrell

What's the future of the Internet?

Which part of it? E-mail? E-commerce? Security issues? Transactions? Intranets? Extranets? Virtual communities? The World Wide Web? Vast databases that can be mined for information? The surface has barely been scratched. The Internet is more than the sum of its parts; there are lots of parts, and there are more to come.

Maybe asking about the Net's future is no longer an appropriate question, however obvious or tempting.

Maybe it's already time for a leap of understanding, an embrace of the inevitable, an almost unquestioning acceptance of a paradigm that has shifted: The future is the Internet.

Surely there's hype embedded in such a statement, especially when it's embedded in the lead to a magazine article. Not even the Internet can be all things to all aspects of all businesses.

Can it?

Of course not. But the Net, and all of the subsets and components that comprise it, is coming closer than anyone thought possible just a few months ago. Internal and external communications, transactions of all sizes, inventory control and delivery, tracking, marketing and advertising, research and forecasting - along with other aspects specific to your business - have all spawned Net offspring, dominions, domains. Those, in turn, are multiplying, evolving, mutating - on the Net.

And the Net is continuing to grow and expand at a rate of acceptance and innovation that leaves all previous technologies gasping in the digital dust.

The Net touches everything, and changes everything it touches. That's the future, and it's already upon us.

Frank Doyle, global leader for the Technology, Infocomm, and Entertainment Industry at PricewaterhouseCoopers puts it succinctly: "The Internet is the single most significant change I've seen in 25 years in business."

That significance, he's quick to point out, flows less from the technology itself than from the astonishing rate at which that technology has been accepted in business and across society.

The CEO who neglects to attend to the Internet's impact or, worse, takes a wait-and-see attitude in hopes of the Net becoming something like a traditional business medium - relatively stable and manageable, long- or even short-term - does so at his company's peril. The Net is here and despite its newness, it is a business given. If you're doing business, you're doing it on or with the help of the Internet.

So let's ask another question, and do so by rephrasing a certain advertising slogan: Where do you want to go tomorrow?

The answer: Wherever you, your customers, and your business lead you. And the odds are that wherever that is, and whatever aspect of your enterprise is going there, the Internet will make up at least a few of the steps along the way.

Indeed, the Net may well serve as both vehicle and destination for your business's journey into the future.

And that future starts today.

What Is This Thing Called Net?

It starts today on amazingly solid ground, with more than 90 million individuals and businesses connected to the Net. That figure, reached from a virtual standing start less than five years ago, represents a rate of growth more than five times as fast as the acceptance of television two generations ago.

And other than its obvious ability to carry marketing messages, television never offered the business tools and competitive opportunities the Net makes available. And the Net's growth rate is gaining speed.

Admittedly, the half-decade just ending has seen the Net evolve more dramatically than at any time in its three-decade history. For much of that history, the Net was a relatively staid, little-known research tool.

Created in 1969 as a partnership between the ivory towers of academe and the corridors of power at the Pentagon, the original purpose of the Internet carried a Cold War cachet: ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), as it was christened, was to be a network for the exchange of defense-related information. The distributed nature of the network - universities, R&D centers, and military installations across the country was both a consequence of geographic reality and a further bid for security. It was hoped that the Net, or at least parts of it, would survive a nuclear attack.

The attack never came, and administration of the Net was transferred to the National Science Foundation. NSF combined ARPANET with other networks, consolidating communications backbones, and formalizing the underlying protocols that enable separate networks - and separate types of computers - to communicate with each other. Most of that communication took place between and among academic researchers. It was a vast and growing electronic bulletin board bearing a myriad of text messages, organized into disciplines, areas of dialogue, discussion groups.

And until the early 1990s the nature of the Net and its content remained the province, primarily, of academics, a valuable and growing resource inaccessible to most of us.

But it was also a revolution - waiting to happen.

Going Uphill Fast