After the Dot-com Crash

There are two things we've had to deal with since the dot-com crash. The first is that we have to work a lot harder to get the same results. We had 50 percent to 100 percent growth for four or five years in a row.

When you have that much growth, you make a lot of mistakes - at least we did. When things slow down, the benefit is that we have a reprieve to consider our actions: "We were spending $8,000 on this ad alone. Was it a good idea? Was there a return on the investment?"

The second thing is accountability. Now we have to ask a lot more questions about why we are doing the things we do and whether these things are working to our benefit. There are many more hard decisions that need to be made. When we were growing and starved for talent, it was really easy to say, "This prospective employee doesn't really line up with the value we have of our company, but let's bring him in anyway because we need someone to do X." Now there are hard decisions to be made about people who aren't fitting with us or aren't providing value. We just can't keep them around.

In technology there is just too much caution now. We have to face the reality that e-business will not go away. There was a heightened sense that what we were doing was going to change the world; that's where we were two and a half years ago with regard to technology and e-business. Now we're down in a trough of disillusionment, where we're scratching our heads and asking, "Where will this technology lead? What will technology mean to us in the future?"

The key thing that made the Internet so accepted during the dot-com craze was that we had e-mail. E-mail was an application that made sense to everyone. It made sense to mom and dad. It made sense to Fortune 1000 companies. It made sense to small business. It was the concept that if I want to get something to you, I can fire it over, and it just shows up in your inbox. That is without question the killer application that made the Internet the common network backbone that connects us all.

Today we don't have a similar application on wireless and mobile devices, but I think there will be something. What that something is today, I don't know. But I believe our devices will get smaller and cheaper. PCs have gone through something similar, where the hardware has more power and is cheaper. A similar thing is happening to the hardware in wireless and mobile devices. Cell phones were a big invention. The Internet is also a powerful technology.

Wireless is a combination of all these things coming together. But the missing piece today is the e-mail equivalent - the killer application for wireless that will make wireless and mobile technology something people can't live without. Checking weather and checking a stock quote on your mobile phone is the closest we've come to creating a universal tool for people to use. But that's not what people want. They aren't going to flock to that technology like they flocked to e-mail. We're still looking for that one technology that will equal e-mail, and someday we'll find it.