1999: Wireless and Y2K

Time magazine named Jeff Bezos of Amazon its “Person of the Year,” writing that “e-business is rapidly replacing the traditional kind for almost any purchase you can imagine.”

Also, on July 21, Steve Jobs demoed the first cheap wireless modem. Wireless networking did not take the world by surprise. For years everyone had understood that the need to embody connectivity in physical wires was an immense constraint on the growth of networking (and a fatal one, in the case of mobile devices). People had been hammering away at the problem for at least a decade, and a few very expensive solutions were running here and there.

What was different about Apple’s AirPort was that it was cheap enough for mass adoption. Over the next several years, wireless LANs began to crop up everywhere. They didn’t necessarily work perfectly; the technology came with many headaches, beginning with security and dependability, and CIOs were to spend many hours hammering out the bugs. They did not, however, do much of that in 1999, for that year CIOs were preparing for the imminent end of civilization, generally known as the Y2K bug.

2000: Millennial Change and Angst

First, Y2K went off without a hitch, proving that luck is on the side of those smart enough to be working on well-posed problems and establishing ERP as the way businesses organized themselves.

Second, an Internet company (Google) developed a well-grounded solution to the problem of making money over the Net.

Third, the culture decided that the Internet did not mean the end of business as we had known it, and everyone rose, stretched and sold off their tech stocks. Good-bye, Pets.com, Chipshot.com, and the rest.

2001: Blogs

People had been writing diaries on the Net for years, but the form had never taken off. In the late 1990s, editors appeared with several subtle enhancements, including browser-based website editing, comments, permalinks, blogrolls and trackbacks. These fixes turned Web diaries into blogs, and by 2001 blogs had become one of the great networking phenomena of the age.

The development of blogs illustrates a subtle point about connectivity. Conventional measurements of networks count nodes and bandwidth, but connectivity has at least a third dimension: adaptedness. Every object in a network has a trajectory of enhancements that allow it to work better and do more in a networked environment. One of the several ways in which connectivity is self-extending is that it provides an environment that selects for greater adaptivity to networking. As objects move down this path, as they mature, connectivity surges, even if nodes and bandwidth stay the same...which, of course, they never do.