"The restructuring now ripping through the Internet sector with the bankruptcies of WorldCom, Global Crossing, and a legion of other Net service providers is often compared to the waves of consolidation that have swept through the railroad industry over the last two centuries.

American railroads went on a spree of track-laying in the 1850s, and again between 1880 and 1920, that foreshadowed telecommunications carriers wrapping the globe with fiber optics in the 1990s. But then the railroad industry endured bankruptcies, mergers, federal bailouts, and abandonments that contracted the US rail network from nearly 250,000 miles in 1920 to under 145,000 today, dominated by just four mega-railroads."

redux [03.05.02]
This Is Money Dotcom boom 'just beginning'

"Each revolution - industrial (1760-1820), railway (1825-1875), steel and electricity (1875-1920), manufacturing (1910-1970) - spawned stock market bubbles that subsequently burst.

'If we lay the information revolution alongside the railway revolution, year for year, we'd now be somewhere around 1850 - just after the railway investment mania of 1845 and its crash in 1847,' says Arthur. Within 65 years of that particular market bubble bursting, Britain was to see its railway network expand from 2,148 miles to 21,000 miles - and some serious money made."

redux [02.19.02]
Business 2.0 Is the Information Revolution Dead?

"At the peak of the Internet frenzy two years ago, when the Nasdaq was over 5,000 and dotcom millionaires were buying spreads in the hills above Palo Alto, it seemed that the information revolution would go on forever. Little tech companies were popping up everywhere, and small investors were reaping returns that made them feel like geniuses. Then the bubble burst. It burst, management guru Peter Drucker tells us, because "the information industry as a business wasn't going anywhere." The information revolution had been hyped, exaggerated. Neither computers nor the Internet, Drucker says, had added much to the economy.

Is the information economy going nowhere? Is its revolution over? In Silicon Valley, certainly, the prospects look bleak. But history suggests that such pessimism is misplaced -- that the information revolution's best days might actually lie ahead."

redux [12.27.01]
The Christian Science Monitor After the dot.com crash

"On the surface, it was a bad year for the Internet.

The dot.com bust left hundreds of companies out of business, thousands of people out of work, and millions of investors out-of-pocket.

But as investors and the economy tried to avoid being sucked down in the whirlpool created when dot.com companies and their stocks capsized, the actual, everyday world of cyberspace continued to transform the ways we live, work, study, play, and just, well, waste time.

redux [10.08.01]
Business 2.0 Peter Drucker Interview

"But it is reasonable to expect that we have not yet really discovered what the Internet is best suited for. Mind you, the steamship was not a great improvement over the first sailing ships. Up until the end of the 19th century, most of the world's ocean freight was still carried by sail. What eliminated the sailing ship was that it takes several years to learn to be a sailor, while it takes 10 minutes to learn to shovel coal into the steamship boiler. The sailing ships died because they couldn't get crews and the steamship crews are unskilled. You need only a very few skilled people on a steamship. To furl and unfurl sails is highly skilled? But the railroad immediately created mobility, on the land, which had never existed.

Today, the Internet eliminates distance for communication."

The New York Times The New Meaning of New Economy
[requires 'free' registration]

"Remember the new economy? What does it mean - if anything - anymore?"

"Impressive as the wonders of the Internet may be, historians point out that all of the technological advances of the post-World War II era probably cannot match the burst of invention that came from the 1850's to 1903: the Bessemer steel-making process, the telegraph, the light bulb, the phonograph, the telephone, the radio, the automobile, rapid transit (subways and elevated trains), the diesel engine, mechanical refrigeration and the airplane."