NFIB

Learning the Right Lessons
01/ 29/ 2004

by Rex Hammock

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the date I first registered my company's Internet domain name. I had never seen nor heard of "the Web;" rather, I registered the domain at the suggestion of the college student who maintained our computer network. While for others it may be difficult to take seriously the advice of a 19-year-old, I, for some reason, always did what he suggested. And, as they say, the rest is history.

Later that same year, I was on the campus of Stanford University for a magazine publishing seminar and was awed during a demonstration of "the Internet" by Paul Saffo, a futurist with the unique gift of making the complex understandable for lay people like me.

He predicted the Internet's future would parallel the histories of other communications technologies. Using the term "macro-myopia" to describe it, he drew a roller-coaster line starting out low and shooting straight up, crashing down, and then, as suddenly heading back up. He used the line to explain a pattern where the new technology so scares (or inspires) us that we tremendously inflate our expectations of what its impact will be. In the short term, the actual performance of the technology disappoints us, resulting in a major downturn in our expectations: Indeed, we may even write off its potential altogether. But, noted Saffo in 1994, after that period of disappointment, we wake up one day and discover the long-term implications of the technology are vastly larger than anything we ever imagined. So influenced by hype and conventional-wisdom, we miss the big picture. Thus, "macro-myopia."

That's where many small businesses find themselves today. Post-Internet boom and bust, the dust is settling on all the confusing hype to reveal that, yes, everything has changed in ways we never imagined. We look around and wonder how we did things before the Internet.

In this issue of MyBusiness, and in issues throughout 2004, we will be exploring the many ways, large and small, the Internet has changed all aspects of the way our readers manage and grow their businesses. But this time around, we'll do it with a little less hype.

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This article originally appeared in the February/March 2004 issue of MyBusiness magazine.

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