The background to this interview is that I was making a presentation in Spain to the II International Walqa E-business Meeting in 2002. The organizers interviewed me so they had some extra content to publish in the proceedings.

Q: You have compared the appearance of the Internet with the appearance of the printing press. Do you believe that current society is already aware of the advantages that can be gained from the new technologies that have emerged?

RB: I currently believe that society is very far from realising what is possible and indeed business is also quite a way from realising what could be achieved. There are very good reasons for this and it makes sense to pursue the analogy of printing to consider this:

Printing was the first information technology that proliferated widely. Indeed printing caused reading and writing to become a common skill over time. In the same way computers and the Internet are making typing, email, surfing and quite a few other things into common skills.

Printing also had other major impacts. It completely destroyed the central control that the Roman Catholic Church had established over Christian doctrine, because suddenly people could print their own Bibles. It made the central control of any kind of knowledge very difficult to impose.

One consequence of the Internet is that information is proliferated far more quickly and there is a much greater amount of feedback possible from those who receive information. Nowadays when you introduce a new idea you get instant feedback. Journalists and even writers and researchers like myself are unable to avoid feedback whether it is critical or not. Everything develops much faster and we have not yet become accustomed to this change of speed.

Also there are many developments that have yet to occur and will not occur until the Internet evolves a little further. Bandwidth availability, for example, is constraining the development of video based business ideas and particularly e-learning, which on its own will constitute a revolution.

Q: After the collapse of the dotcoms, have companies lost confidence in the Internet or is confidence reviving?

RB: The dotcom collapse was in some ways a healthy economic development – but it is also a cause of delay in the onset of a number if new technologies and developments which will have a revolutionary impact on the way that businesses work and individuals behave.

Dealing with the positive side first, a whole number of business experiments were taking place on the Internet and the dotcom collapse brought many of them to a quick conclusion in one way or another. It forced many web sites to prove that they had viable business models.

Thus it is clear that the ISPs have a genuine business model even if Yahoo and AOL no longer look as healthy as they were. Ebay has proved that on-line auctioning is a real market, but has also demonstrated that there is not room for many on-line auction houses. Amazon has demonstrated the viability of e-retail for easily packaged items such as books, CDs and videos. A whole host of other retail sites have demonstrated the e-retail is a viable market.

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