"When the future arrived, most people weren't paying attention.
Most journalists are like me: easily distracted by loud and shiny things. Few things in our recent history have been as bright and well-hyped as the e-commerce bubble. Now that it's over, it's easier to see that the real heroes weren't building online bookstores or virtual pet food empires.
The 'Internet Boom' was a decidedly late-Twentieth Century affair, with salesmen anxious to replace craptacular brick-n'-mortar businesses with cyber-analogs. For all their talk about building the world of tomorrow, their most inspired idea for the Net was to make it just like TV. Meanwhile, a whole 'nother group of people were building structures that eat TV: think Napster, think Slashdot, think blogs." [Wild Blue Yonder]
