My opinion on John Robb on The New Economy http://jrobb.userland.com/stories/2002/05/17/theNewEconomy.html (incidentally this is my first test of a short cut in Radio & it don't work the way I am accustomed to in Manila).
For commerce to work, it needs a community of interacting people. The Internet encourages a growth in communities. Web sites must be prepared for flash crowds as the word of e-mouth gets out about a great place. An Internet weakness, impeding potential productivity, is the proliferation of misinformed, rumor, conspiracy theorists, virus hoaxes, latest plea from Nigeria.
We can define productivity using a combination of factors, including JT's lessons about working smart, instead of working hard. It is not output per unit of something, but useful output, that contributes to the bottom line either by adding income or reducing costs. Don't measure lines of code from programmers, measure what the programs do, and how long we go from bug disruption to bug disruption, or discovery that some fix didn't, in software we paid hard earned money for. It is not per unit time of the worker, but per unit time that gets paid for, over the life of the person on the payroll. It is not purely by person on the payroll, but also how you factor in office electronics, robots, infrastructure.
The Internet provides us with connections to an infinite wealth of information, for people with finite attention spans, so there is a continuing market for better tools to automate the indexing and searching of that information.
Did the Internet enable a new economy?
(The Internet was invented almost half a century ago thanks to ARPANET in 1969, but it wasn't until the spread of personal computers, invented in the 1970's, to the business world in 80's & 90's that we achieved sufficient critical mass to drive the price down so that a large proportion of the middle class was wired.)
Yes, several in fact, including some gigantic BigCo like Microsoft and AOL. However, to many people "New Economy" is identified with why the dot com collapse, so we need a new terminology to keep what's valid about the Information Economy (e.g. faster exchange of info means faster return on cash flow) separated from what was invalid (e.g. profits not needed, income not needed, everyone loves to work with no pay).
Is the Internet an extension of the past? Yes and No. It has enabled new markets and services in the information age which are engines of productivity and new business. Meanwhile enterprises and industries, that existed long before the Internet are expanding their ways of communicating with customers and suppliers to take advantages of Internet infrastructure.
2:11:55 PM 
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