A few months before Mastering the Dot, The Economist writer Matthew Symonds wrote in The Net Imperative:

Within a few years, the Internet will turn business upside down. Be prepared - or die.

"In five years' time," says Andy Grove, the chairman of Intel, "all companies will be Internet companies, or they won't be companies at all." Just another example of the arrogance and exaggeration the information technology industry is notorious for? Yes, in the sense that Mr Grove is as keen as the next chip maker to scare customers into buying his products. No, in the sense that, allowing for a little artistic licence, he is probably right.

Apart from the bit about the way we have sex (I mean, come on!), I had no reason to doubt it. What seems remarkable in retrospect are the high levels of pessimism expressed by commentators at the time - myself included - about business's capacity to absorb the changes and deal with this most disruptive of technologies.

Perhaps we should have been focusing on the users instead.

Faster and Faster

In the year 2000 one new e-marketplace was opening every eight hours, and worldwide business-to-business (B2B) Internet commerce surpassed $US433.3 billion. Some pundits confidently predicted worldwide e-markets would make more than $US8.5 trillion by 2005.

Gartner insisted B2B would grow at aggressive rates through 2004, causing fundamental changes to the way businesses do business with one another. The research group predicted the worldwide B2B market would grow from $US145 billion in 1999 to $US403 billion in 2000 and $US953 billion in 2001. In 2002, the market would increase to $US2.18 trillion, and at the end of 2003 worldwide B2B revenue would hit $US3.95 trillion. By 2004, B2B e-commerce would represent 7 percent of the forecast $US105 trillion total global sales transactions.

So, if B2B was going to transform the way we did business and achieve the goal of lowering business costs, and markets were going to grow so dramatically, are we there yet?

Well, hundreds of the e-markets so hastily formed to capitalize on the boom just as quickly folded again. According to www.emarketservices.com, e-markets made a rather paltry $US1.41 trillion in year 2003 and were expected to generate $US2.37 trillion in year 2004. There are still plenty of businesses at the small and medium ends of the market conducting most of their business much the way they always have, with phone and fax still their standard.

On the other hand the Internet has transformed business-to-consumer (B2C) business processes. Larger Aussie businesses have taken to e-commerce like ducks to water, and some Australians have embraced online purchasing with their usual gusto for the new. (While the Australian Bureau of Statistics notes that in 2004-05, 56 percent of Australian households had home Internet access, just 31 percent of Australian adults ordered goods or services by the Internet. Travel, accommodation and tickets were most popular.)

E-markets are saving plenty of organizations significant time and money on administrative chores, driving down some prices, and letting some companies work with their extended supply chain to strip out excessive inventories. And while many "pure e-commerce" companies disappeared during the dotcom collapse in 2000 and 2001, many "brick-and-mortar" retailers recognized that such companies had identified valuable niche markets and began to add e-commerce capabilities to their Web sites.

For example, Wikipedia describes how when US online grocer Webvan collapsed, two traditional supermarket chains, Albertsons and Safeway, started e-commerce subsidiaries through which consumers could order groceries online. (Wikipedia, the online free-content encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, is itself a transformative and disruptive creation.)

"As of 2005, e-commerce has become well-established in major cities across much of North America, Western Europe and certain East Asian countries like South Korea. However, e-commerce is still emerging slowly in some industrialized countries, and is practically nonexistent in many Third World countries," Wikipedia notes.