At a recent e-business research meeting, I was asked the following questions: “Five years from now, what will be happening with the Internet, and what breakthrough research projects in e-business will have contributed to the changes?”My (intentionally provocative) answer was: “Lots of good things will happen, butnone of them will be enabled by research breakthroughs.” To understand my thinking, let’s look at the present from the perspective of the not-too-distant future.The View From 2006One thing I clearly remember about the early years of this century was the big e-business backlash. For a while in the 1990s, people thought that any business with “.com” at the end of it or the lettere in front of it was an automatic license to make millions! With such wildly unrealistic expectations, we shouldn’t have been surprised to see a backlash that was almost as silly and extreme in its disillusionment as the original expectations had been in their blind faith. For a time during the backlash, people thought anything related to the Internet or the New Economy was doomed to failure.Eventually, the disillusionment worked its way out of the system.
