The discussion was held in conjunction with the Internet World trade show and hosted by the U.S. Postal Service and BBN Corp. in association with the 1996 NII Awards. The panel included Mitch Ratcliffe, editorial director of the Digital Media newsletter in San Francisco, CA; George Conrades, chairman and CEO of BBN Corp., an internetworking products and services provider in Cambridge, MA; John Patrick, vice president of Internet technology for IBM; and James Hake, cofounder and principal of Access Media, Inc. of Hacienda Heights, CA.
"In technology, where business models keep moving forward at the speed of light, businesses have trouble," said Ratcliffe. Conrades agreed, saying that the World Wide Web is changing from its original communications model to a transaction model. "The home page is dead," added Patrick. What really counts, he said, is a rich WWW site that "does something," providing value and prompting users to return. "Just putting a page out there hawking goods" is no longer sufficient. Sites will have to go further. The real question will become just how much users trust certain sites.
Patrick also pointed out another change, one that has been almost invisible to the Internet user but essential to its growth: the evolution of the Internet from a single National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored backbone to a complex, multiply redundant interwoven mesh of backbones involving 200 companies. Those companies, composing a commercial Internet exchange, formally took over the Internet backbone from NSF a year ago, turning the Internet's structure into a kind of "fibrous root system of trunks going into still bigger trunks," explained Patrick. This kind of technological change will solve perceived problems such as bandwidth limitations. Patrick also predicted that the availability of bandwidth will grow faster than the need for bandwidth. "Different forms of bandwidth, such as cable modems, are going to emerge very rapidly," he said. "I don't think bandwidth is going to be an issue before long."
Conrades disagreed, arguing that bandwidth growth would not meet demand. "You'll always have a need to do more," he said. "We probably will see a mismatch between demand and capacity." However, he added, "We'll see bandwidth grow regularly. There is no lack of interest in the infrastructure."
Ratcliffe felt that an even greater issue is how much access to bandwidth a company will give its employees. He urged companies to empower their workers. "Large corporations are as resistant to change as any bureaucrat," he said, pointing to the prevalence of new software that restricts employee access to the Internet. This software, he argued, is ample evidence that companies are afraid of where their workers will go on the Web and how much time they will spend there. "It's a much more difficult process to change a company's way of doing things than to combat stupid laws in Washington," he said. "The corporate environment definitely needs to change to enable employees to do their jobs better."
That resistance to change, the panelists pointed out, frequently comes from the middle layer of management rather than the top. Middle managers feel threatened by new forms of communication, since most of the middle is not needed if a company has good communication. Often, the CEO of a company senses what is going on but does not know what to do about it. In many cases, organizations feel threatened by the words "opening up" and by employees who find out what other organizations are doing.
Nevertheless, successful organizations are discovering that they need to broaden their avenues of communication if they are to succeed. This point was stressed by Hake and seconded by Conrades who emphasized that savvy companies are already finding ways to save money and increase revenue using the Internet. Conrades pointed to the example of Cisco Systems, a San Jose, CA-based internetworking products company, that, he said, saves $4 million a year by responding to customer inquiries via its Web site instead of using an 800-prefix telephone number. "Customer service applications are proving themselves today."