Commentary: India Internet World

COMMENTARY
INDIA INTERNET WORLD
The Dawn Of The Third Industrial Revolution

A tour of the recently concluded India Internet World may make it seem more like the dusk. It may be that for pure-play dotcoms, but the net is alive and well.

By R. Sukumar

Deepak Chandnani is wicked. The salt-and-pepper bearded banker who gave up a promising career at Citibank just around a year ago to head Yahoo's Indian operations wants to know where the competition is. He's right, of course, there is no sign of any of the other horizontal portals, but that doesn't make him any less wicked.

Chandnani is standing in the Yahoo India stall, the most happening place at India Internet World (IIW), the annual internet economy jamboree where khaki-slacks-and-polo-shirt meets khaki-slacks-and-polo-shirt, where veecees find companies and companies find veecees, where deals are struck, alliances forged, and a good time had by all, especially in conferences where sparkling speaker meets live-wire audience.

Actually, part of that sentence, like much of the new economy is in a temporal warp. None of those descriptors can be used to describe this IIW, the fourth of its kind. What can, is probably the number atop the cubicle-sized stall assigned to domain name registrar Network Solutions, 404.

Chandnani is upbeat; this is his and Yahoo India's first IIW, and while it may lack the gaiety of the previous years, a debut is a debut. The officious oracle is one of the few dotcoms to be present at IIW. The majority of the stalls-75 in all this year, as compared to almost twice that in 2000-are occupied by the net's nuts-and-bolts people, the Suns, Junipers, and Computer Associates of the world, not the kind of companies that'll go belly up because of a couple of bad years.

Missing too, are the marquee-names. Michael Dertouzos of MIT, god bless his soul, is dead and gone. Sabeer Bhatia is probably tired of the hundreds of bad puns hacks came up with around hotmail, and is plotting his next move. And Jack Ma of Alibaba is busy trying to recollect those magic words.

Spare a thought, and, if you are the lachrymose-type, a tear, for those years of irrational exuberance. Then, you were either on the bus, or off it. So hop on everyone did.

Two years ago, anything went. Last year's buzz words were b2b, exchanges, and p2p. And this year's are infrastructure provider and building blocks. But there is a feeling that businesses built around these are, like those that came before them, pre-ordained to fail. That's new economy nihilism for you.

The net will, as the Masters of the Universe rashly promised four years ago, change everything, but with time. Communication, not commerce, or content, or communities is the killer app of the Indian net experience. Chandnani, whose company has just launched a Yahoo-Messenger-through-the-mobile-phone service in association with Hutch will agree.

Like some seemingly retrograde economists and management gurus predicted at the peak of the dotcom boom, the internet, circa 2001, is nothing more than an alternative delivery channel and a great tool to improve a company's operational effectiveness.

As for the bust, that was only to be expected. The Transcontinental Railroad was, when it was commissioned in 1869, the equivalent of the internet browser. It linked the east coast of the US with the west, encouraged people to settle in the west, and facilitated commerce.

It also engendered a railroad boom. Work started on four additional routes to the Pacific, financed primarily by debt. The end came in 1873. Northern Pacific was the first to go, investors rushed for the nearest exit, and 89 highly-leveraged railroad companies went bust. That should sound familiar.

End-word: It was MIT economist Lester Thurow who described the net as the harbinger of the third industrial revolution, after the steam engine, which set off the first, and electricity, which did the second.

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