|
California has been called the land of fruits and nuts, but that was in a kinder, gentler time. Today it is Artificial Reality Inc, Cyberfornia, the Golden e-Gate, and more, more, more. Net stuff saturates. Every billboard is shouting something or other .com. BMWs and Starbucks are the way of life. The computer nerd is role model and hero. Silicon Valley now exceeds Alaska in the ratio of unmarried, eligible men. But the word among the unmarried, eligible womenfolk is that while the odds are good, the goods are odd. Real estate prices in the valley are four times that of Western Connecticut, and houses are built on 1/8-acre plots. Real estate agents report that almost all their low $1m sales are to people under 35. The venture capitalists are out of Oz. Are there really responsible businessmen, sharp, savvy, and vetted, who are willing and anxious to give billions of dollars to any scruffy computer literate with a half-baked idea of doing something new on the Net? The short answer is “yes.” The long answer is, “Hell, yes.” In the Wall Street Journal of February 22, 2000, an article by George Anders relates how VC firms have to fight off major institutions and rich individuals who are clamoring to put their money into the venture funds no matter what those firms are doing. The criterion for e-people to change jobs these days is stock options, not salary. The traditional career path is history. The Wall Street Journal of December 23, 1999, gets it just right in an incidental item buried on page B6. An insurance company executive left for an Internet startup, worked there for eight months, was fired for poor job performance, and walked away with immediately convertible stock options worth $600 million. However, the most disruptive assault on our value system is not the adventures of the e-warriors out there in Sillycon Valley, but the growing acceptance of them building up in that little back corner of our minds where we hide the realities of life—a dawning awareness, the arrival of the unthinkable. It might just be that all of this is not a temporary aberration of our value system, but actually the reality of our transition into the e-world. And with that comes the realization that there is no going back. The business world is not going to return to what we once thought it was. Possibly, just possibly, we are going to have to play the game their way. East of the Hudson River we may never do it with the flair of the Silicon Valley ’99ers, but do it we will. So how do we cope with this e-Niño blowing in from the West Coast? It’s not like Y2K, where we could fuss with details and apply the structured management techniques that make us comfortable. It’s a mindset problem. Nobody knows where it’s really going, so the e-way is to think way out, hold nothing back, and when your gut says go, you go. You take the risk and think out of the box. Now this is neither easy nor obvious to us of the clam chowder set. And if we just blunder in, we will lose. We must ease in to be with it. And how do we do that? We start by exposing ourselves to the ambiance. And where better to do this but that West Coast mood box moved East, Starbucks. We make a half-hour at Starbucks our necessity of the day. Sip a latté, absorb the atmosphere, suspend the drill, stretch the imagination, project the possibilities, image the wildest. The great opportunity can happen only if you let it in. Starbucks provides the opening, and then your new California mindset takes over. We let the atmosphere mellow our senses and open our minds to the technology tumble. To a cool, New Age background we let ourselves think about the concepts of Business and the Consumer. Of course, B2B is mainstream now. C2C is eBay and everywhere. B2C, you can’t get away from. And what about C2B? The major industries are adapting their procurement systems to the Net. But of course C2B is stupid, unworkable, not practical, no prospects at all. Yea, right. With half a cup left, we dream a
bit about the disruptive technologies that will make bandwidth
considerations go away, and what that opens up. We imagine graphic
technologies that intermingle reality and the artificial. A whole
new life experience is there, and who wouldn’t pay for that
trip. |
|
|
