"We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings - and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it. " - from the Cluetrain Manifesto - http://www.cluetrain.com

Editor's Note: Chris Locke crashed our radar screen 1993. In 1994 we reported on some of his earlier iconoclastic activities with MecklerWeb. He had designed an alliance of companies that would function as a Internet portal. The only problem is that back then no one had figured out that there might be a market for such a thing. His latest product is the Cluetrain Manifesto -- www.cluetrain.com -- a powerful screed that he and three fellow instigators have just nailed to the doors of corporate America. We have here 95 theses that purport to explain what most large corporations do not yet understand about the Internet. The Internet is the catalyst which sparked the Cluetrain manifesto. The Internet is also a medium that promotes styles of communication that are deeply subversive of standard ways of doing business. The Manifesto shows why the web empowered voices of millions of small businesses and consumers may overturn the industrial age control-oriented business models of giant companies.

Five years ago, with Mecklerweb, Locke saw the web as a tool by which markets could be radically restructured to bring companies much closer to their customers. He imagined that, once the corporate decision makers were shown the ways in which the web could open all kinds of new communication channels, both between the company and its customers and within the corporation itself, management would share his vision. In short he was certain that management would become just as enthusiastic about using the web to reform the way the corporation did business as he was. He was wrong.

That was five years ago. Since then the web has swept the internet. Everything and everyone is on the world wide web. "I web there I am." After Alan Meckler pulled the plug on Mecklerweb in September 1994 Chris did tours of duty at MCI and IBM. There Locke found that corporate executives saw the web not as a transformative tool but as a mirror, the purpose of which was to reflect their own views of an orderly world amenable to the continued top-down controls of the industrial age. While Locke saw pockets of innovation in the large corporations, control-insistent hierarchies usually conquered the efforts of the innovators whose temperament he shared. The Cluetrain Manifesto marks the "revenge" of the innovators.

Since the internet served as a low cost platform for further experimentation and development of the vision Locke had seen in 94, he launched his own business to teach those who would listen how web sites could be used creatively in the internet medium. At a 1996 Esther Dyson retreat that gathered industry creative types together to bounce ideas off each other, he gave a tub thumping talk on how the big folks just didn't get it. "Give'em hell rage boy," shouted someone from the back of the audience.

The moment struck a chord and Locke adopted the online personna of RageBoy. Why not use a web site and a mail list to proselytize for what he believed in? He launched his own mail list or e-zine called Entropy Gradient Reversals (www.rageboy.com) under the motto "all noise, all the time." With his focus on what the web could be, he began to publish a regular series of "rants" where he satirized those who didn't understand the new paradigm and praised those who did. After nearly 3 years with 3000 subscribers Locke has the ultimate Internet marketing vehicle - a means of acquainting potential web customers with his views. Having been an EGR subscriber is a requirement for sitting down with Chris to discuss buying his other services.

The web-based marketplace has thrown Chris together with many other iconoclasts. Cluetrain is the exposition of where the loose fast and out of control web and internet is headed. It is the product of Locke and three other co-conspirators. According to Locke: "The four of us: David Weinberger, myself, Doc Searles, Rick Levine probably have somewhere on the order of 75 to 80 years combined experience in being online. We also have considerable experience in doing various forms of marketing and Web stuff and interacting with business. Consequently what we have formulated in the Cluetrain manifesto is not very theoretical. We are boiling down the experiences that we have heard from many people and that we have had ourselves. Much of the response we're getting is along the lines of: why did this take so long? We know this but we also believe that it is the first time that it is been all articulated as strongly and in a single place."

Now while The COOK Report is by no means ready to abandon its focus on internet infrastructure (engine rooms and the underlying transport technologies) we have been giving some thought to taking occasional looks at seismic movements taking place among the higher levels of the protocol stack. Having read the Cluetrain manifesto, we wondered how to bridge the gap between its apocalyptic views and the level of stock market inebriation with anything having the odor of Internet commerce. Thinking that perhaps an expedition in the direction of Internet commerce and the higher levels of the protocol stack might be in order, we called Chris on March 28.

COOK Report: What exactly have you done?

Locke: We have created a synthesis of ideas, many of which, have been in the air for a while now. I also see this is a kind of gestalt that might inform your perspective and that of your readers over time. While right now you are focusing mostly on infrastructure, we see the Cluetrain manifesto as more consumer oriented. Cluetrain, at its most basic, is emphasizing how different the Internet is from broadcast.

COOK Report: And a lot of people are still having trouble realizing that?

Locke: The people who have trouble realizing these are people, whether not they are aware of it, who, in their heart of hearts, have trouble realizing that the Internet is not just TV with a buy button. These are executives are making decisions to allocate hundreds millions dollars on Internet and Web applications but who have no real first-hand experience of the medium.

COOK Report: Nothing ever changes. Dave Hughes in 1980 and in 1981 went to Washington as the largest single customer of the Source to talk to Source executives about what he liked and did not like and found that these executives never used their own systems either.

Locke: I'm not terribly surprised. New technology comes down to people who tend to evaluate it only in terms of technologies that they know. Thus when photography appeared, people went: oh, that's sort of like painting. And then movies came, and people say: oh, this is like the stage. We'll make a movie by bolting the camera to the center front of the stage where it can capture the action. And then television comes around, and people say: hold on. This is just like motion pictures. McLuhan said it: all new communication technologies are initially perceived in terms of their predecessors.

The Cluetrain manifesto is about the vast difference. The Internet is perceived as television by people who haven't used the internet. You will not understand why the net-as-TV inference is wrong unless you have spent a lot of time on the net itself.

COOK Report: But isn't Cluetrain derived from a broader foundation than that of the mistaken harping of marketing executives? Doesn't it reflect expectations from a growing number of people who are spending more and more time in the online medium as to what can and should be done with the medium itself? But the reactions of readers have been powerful enough so that it seems to go beyond just this. What are you saying that provides this extra spark?

Locke: One thing we're saying that we think is quite powerful is that markets are learning and self-organizing at a faster pace than companies. Organizations won't even face their customers unless their information is coordinated first. But coordination takes time. Nevertheless, the big product here has been Lotus Notes. Unfortunately Lotus Notes is a top-down installation which requires that the IT Department do the systems analysis and spend weeks asking people what they really need in the way of forms and macros and things like that.

The open marketplace can organize without the constraints of hierarchy, of bureaucracy, and of command and control that saddle most organizations. If you take the curves of learning over time and graph them on a chart, you have the shape of a hockey stick which represents the marketplace. It's sort of flat for a while, but then when it starts rising, it rises like a hockey stick. In this open marketplace, ideas are tossed from person to person with great rapidity. Try this. No, this works better. Boom, boom, boom. It's like Linnux. We just had Eric Raymond, author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar and President of the Open Source initiative sign up with the following comment: "the Cluetrain is to marketing and communications what the open source movement is software development -- anarchic, messy, rude, and vastly more powerful than the doomed bullshit that conventionally passes for wisdom." It is a territory where no ideas are off-limits. Whatever works goes.

If you map this, you have markets that are learning very very fast. While, at the same time, you have Corporations, with their emphasis on hierarchy and control, almost flat lining it. Right now the open market curves are under corporate ones, but they, are coming out very fast. Where the two cross will be the point at which everything changes. What we are saying is that the open market learning curve will be shaped like a hockey stick - rising very suddenly and steeply when it begins to learn. We are already beginning to experience it. It will be a discontinuity. Think chaos theory. The big corporations will literally not have time to react.

We are not crystal balling this one except to say that these companies could die as a result of this change. Why? Because this smart market -- out there on the Internet is deconstructing the marketing messages coming out of these large corporations. One of the biggest uses of the Internet is to send around joke mail. You know -- things like: Microsoft buys the Catholic Church. But you know it's not just Microsoft. It's everyone. Someone gets some clueless home page and suddenly you have thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are rolling on the floor and laughing and going oh my God look at that -- I can't believe these bozos. You know how fast word like that travels.

But there are many big corporations that don't have their ear to this kind ground. They go to their corporate meetings; pat each other on the back; congratulate each other for being written up in all the right places. And all this happens while the marketplace is saying: yeah, we will buy your technology a while longer -- so long as is not totally busted, but we're just not impressed that you understand what's going on.

COOK Report: Well if you look at the role of technology in the century just ending, you will see that at the beginning corporations were needed perhaps because the industrial age called for a size, scale and scope that only a giant organization could provide. The cost of entry into new markets and businesses was so high that only a large corporation could cope.

Locke: Yes if you wanted to put together the next car company or the next Hurst or Gannet publishing Co., the cost of entry was vast. But Web reduced the cost of entry to near zero.

COOK Report: Consequently as long as everyone can interconnect and communicate, they can self-organize.

Locke: And a really good example of this is MP 3. This compression standard came out of a place called the Froenhaufer Institute in Germany -- your standard academic research lab. Within the last couple of years the technology has leaked out onto the net. The compressor, a very proprietary piece of software, was grabbed by some French teenager who, thinking it to be freeware, distributed it, worldwide. Now when that happened the authorities found out about it fairly quickly and came down upon him like a ton of bricks. Now once this happened, it was too late for a friend of mine who had it on his FTP site in Texas did not even know that he was in possession of anything of significance. Consequently, I was able to grab one from Texas, and another from Korea and so on.

If you take a track from a CD, you will find that a typical rock song is easily 50 or 60 MB. The MP 3 compression ratio is between 10 and 12 to one. As a result that 50 MB Nirvana song may be easily compressed to about 4 MB. And at four megabytes you can even email it to a friend. Now I found a Mariia Cary cut about a week after her album was released. You'd have to be an audio file to really be able to tell the difference if you were to do a blindfold test between a commercial CD and the MP3 playback. It is like light years beyond real audio. It does take some time to download but it has changed the economics of the 50- billion-dollar world-wide recording industry and has that industry quaking in its boots. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) rattled its sabres and said that it had this Web "bot" that was going to go and find these sites offering the MP 3 files and shut them down. But at the same time I'm seeing on Usenet lists announcements of FTP sites run by these warez kids saying: here's a new Site but come quick it will only be up for the next eight hours. Here is the listed stuff you can download, but hit it quickly before we change the IP address.

This is smart markets in operation. Copyright is an obstacle. We can route around it. We are faster than you and we know more than you. I said to myself the other day: these kids are just goofing off. If they ever get serious - game over.

COOK Report: So, in the area of electronic commerce, rather than trying to replicate the industrial age you had better focus on the issue of how you plan for and cope with these kinds of technology changes?

Locke: Yes, and from this point of view, MP3 is again a good model, because Tom Petty has got an album coming out in mid April. And almost a month ago now he went to MP3.com and said: Here's one of the prime tracks from this thing. I will give it to you in MP3. Distribute it to the world for free. Now you know that this guy's album, when it comes out, will go to the top of the charts.

This is one of the differences -- markets getting smarter and organizing faster than can the company, which thought that it owned the markets, but, in reality, doesn't know what its dealing with anymore. One of the things that we say about this -- and its really important -- is that smart markets are like the Internet itself without a centralized brain. Did you ever see a flock of birds flying formation very close to each other and suddenly changing direction without any of the birds colliding? There is no lead bird. They suddenly just all swoop -- gracefully and rapidly changing course.

Like the flock of birds suddenly changing direction, markets can change their suppliers overnight. If it is perceived that this company is clueless; that they no longer have the vaguest notion of how to respond to us, the change will not happened gradually over time. It will happen between 3 and 5 p.m. on some random Thursday that they will realize that their market is suddenly gone. It will happen because someone else came along who understood the community, knew exactly what the requirements were and offered something that they could download easily. Now in fact there is a rather large example of this that actually did permit a couple of years of response time. The company involved is Amazon. But by the time Borders and Barnes and Noble took Amazon seriously, it was too late to recover.

COOK Report: One of the best uses left for their physical stores is as a place to go if you actually want to hold and look at the book before you return home and by it from Amazon.

Locke: The point is there are other sources of revenue for the physical stores, but if Amazon takes enough of their market share away, their margins are shot to hell. Now I saw this ad online in the Industry Standard the other day and it left me in stitches. It was an IBM ad for their e-commerce campaign. "IBM, your e-solution provider," it purrs. And then it goes: Borders -- to whom did they turn when they wanted to come onto the Web? They turned to IBM.

I know the story behind this. I was on Salon -- a conferencing system and a big big e-zine one that is very slick -- the day that they came up. In fact they came up, and crashed, came up again. On the first day they said "sponsored by Borders." Now I'm a big book fan and I like Borders so I said: oh, cool and I went clicking over to find Borders to see what they had in their electronic store. All I found was: "coming soon." Now that was like late '95 I am going to say because it happened while I was still in Connecticut. I thought: oh well, they'll be up in a few weeks. It was a few years! I kept going back and saying to myself: what's taking you so long? Finally I talked to an EGR subscriber who worked for Borders who said: "don't ask. You don't want to know."

COOK Report: The corporate hierarchy was probably pissing and moaning about every little step.

Locke:It is not just that. Here's this ad from IBM saying: we are responsible for having brought Borders onto the Web, and I am going: you are responsible for having lost them their business because you took so long. You gave Amazon a two year head start over them you idiots. The point being that it to the unwashed, that IBM ad would look very persuasive. But to someone who really knows, it's like: you brought Borders online two years too late. What are you crowing about?

And who can forget how IBM screwed up the Olympic reporting a couple of years ago when they were in charge of all the new feeds to something like a 150 international news organizations? It wasn't just that their Web sites couldn't handle it. They also hosed the data. They had video feeds with people who looked eleven feet tall wrestling people who looked two feet tall. Things stayed messed up through most of the Olympic's and they had the international press just screaming. Now can you imagine? I went to their Web site while all this mess was happening and it said: "and we can do this for your company."

The point being -- by contrast -- Amazon started out as a little company "that knew." Amazon's competitors paid no attention to its Internet strategy, but, as we know, things changed really fast. And those people are really scared to death of Amazon today. In fact they're not just scared; they are bleeding from them. This is a story that will be repeated over and over.

Now the other aspect of Cluetrain that we think is definitely new is that there is a particular style of conversation on the net. That this style facilitates, enables, and mediates. This style is voice-to-voice. People talking the way you and I are right now. People are telling war stories. But the language that they are using this completely antithetical to that of the press release, the language of the annual report, and language of the dog and pony pitch of the big corporations.

COOK Report: Part of what you are talking about is whether or not there can be trust in these communications channels. And from your description there is precious little trust. Ed Gerck is a specialist on authentication who talks about trust as something that can be delivered only out side of the channels by which people are communicating at any given moment. That people will recognize a style of communication with which they feel comfortable. Does that make any sense in the current context?

Locke: Yeah, it does because we all bring a varied inventory of knowledge and expectations to our communications. For example because I know you, when you call me up, my reaction to your call will be very different than it would to a salesman's cold call.

COOK Report: I tend, in part, to base my decision on whether or not to open a message read it, on my knowledge of and trust in the author based on long past experience reading other postings by that person.

Locke: Absolutely. Here is another gating factor which is getting to be a finely honed skill. How many seconds does its take you to recognize a spam message? I have gotten it down to about a tenth of a second. The cues are very subtle. But given the increased volume I have developed a hair trigger relationship with my delete key. The same thing governs my relationship with the delete key and visiting new Web sites. Now there are companies out there reporting millions of its day, but if they were honest, they would report that the lengths of stay of a large number of their visitors on their WebSite is measured in seconds.

So part of the equation in this new environment is the difference of voice. I wrote a piece for the Industry Standard called Fear and Loathing on the Web. Reacting to that article David Weinberger said: "the dogs have it right. They want to take a good long wiff. Companies that cannot, or will not, speak in a human voice built Web sites that smell like death." That was the beginning of Cluetrain and its quoted right on our home page next to the run-over armadilo that is road kill. We recognize each other by the kind of voice that we used to communicate human being to human being. We do not recognize corporate rhetoric as belonging to our conversations.

And there's another model here as well. Netscape started out with that kind of voice. But then they hired Barksdale who came in with the pin stripe suit spouting the corporate ethic and went out and tried to sell servers. And in doing so Barksdale just turned off this religiously committed market that wanted to have a conversation with a company that was speaking its own language. He turned it off like one would a light switch. Now Netscape wants to blame Microsoft for undermining its business. They killed themselves because they didn't have the nerve to walk the talk.

We say in the manifesto, if you look at the conversation going on in an open healthy Intranet, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the conversations of the marketplace. One of the Manifesto's statements says: if you want to sell to me, get down off your camel and take your shoes off at my door. Now this may be a little bit jarring, but there is a legacy reason that it is there. At one point I had started to write a narrative version that would be in a column to the right of the 95 theses. It started with a hypothetical market in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago. Then the real marketplace was almost certainly in the midst of the town square. It was wherever people who lived there went there to talk.

COOK Report: Yes, and what happened that attracted people like you and I and Dave Hughes to this technology some 20 years ago, was a sense that just maybe a return to something like this marketplace was an inherent possibility in the maturity of this technology.

Locke: True. We call this part: ancient markets. People did not go first and foremost to these old markets to buy olives and things like that. They went there to hear stories. And because these were guys coming in on camel caravans from God knows where there were a lot of stories to be told.

COOK Report: Twenty years ago on the source, one of the earliest commercial networks, Dave Hughes discovered that storytelling held to the key to getting other net users to corporate with him.

Memes and the Marketplace

Locke: In the Internet possession of the story is preeminent. If you really look with fresh eyes at what happens on the Internet, you will see that people use a very large portion of their time in trading jokes. This is analogous to the stories of the ancient marketplace. Such stories often express what we call memes or common ways of thinking about problems and events. Last fall the meme that probably travelled the fastest in the history of the world was 'when John Glenn comes back from space lets all wear ape suits." As soon as he went up in the shuttle last November some wag said it and the first time I saw it, I thought that I was going to swallow my tongue. I had just sent it out to 3,000 people that morning on the my EGR list saying: this is really good, pass it on. That evening, coming back from Denver, I had the radio on and it's All Things Considered talking about the Glenn and how he is doing up there. And then adds: there is an interesting thing going on in the Internet. And one of the Cluetrain guys David Weinberger unbeknownst to me comes on and says: "however on the Internet it has jokingly been decided that when John Glenn comes back from space we should all wear ape suits." No corporation could get word around with the speed at which the ape suit meme traveled -- not even by buying a Super Bowl ad.

Another meme was Hank, the angry drunken dwarf. People Magazine has a contest to select their annual Person of the Year. Now last year they decided they would do it on the Internet. The issue was who is your favorite person? Take from our lineup of movie stars and other celebrities. Well some person on the Internet designed it to nominate a fellow who is the sidekick of Howard Sterne. This sidekick has the name of Hank, the angry drunken dwarf. I had never heard of him. But he started getting a block of write in votes. The idea that Hank should be supported and instruction in the means of doing so started traveling the net. Word quickly became: write in Hank the angry drunken dwarf. In short order Hank was at the top of the list. People Magazine decided that this was not what it had intended and announced they would remove the Hank votes. Unfortunately for People, by the next morning, due to the efforts of his behind the scene supporters, Hank was on top again. People would delete the votes refusing to acknowledge them, but within hours they would be replaced. This was an example of a community of people just playing with its power.

They are saying where are the edges? Where are the buttons? How does this work? When this gets organized, that hockey stick I was talking about is going to take off. It goes right through the roof. It can bring down Microsoft; it can bring down General Motors if it doesn't like their friggin bow tie. That is power.

My experience with MecklerWeb was five years ago. A lot has happened since then. The same dynamics are still there. Only today they are orders of magnitude more powerful. But no one who really understands these dynamics is talking about them -- except for little e-zines out on the fringes of the net. JoHo and EGR are e-zines written by people who live and breathe this stuff but who are not being invited to the big mainstream conferences to talk about it. We just decided that the time is ripe for this because all these forces are coalescing. People are talking about trillions of dollars in e-commerce, but we think that they are just simply deluded because they think the metrics for measuring e-commerce are things like click through rates and how many things you buy given an amount of time online. Those who would do e-commerce assume that there is no change to be made from what they would do in advertising in the local paper or putting ads on television. They take the same heuristic's, the same algorithms and extend them into the net. And suddenly you have the latest figures from Foerester: by the year 2002 there will be "x" trillion dollars in e-commerce.

Our messages are easily brushed off in the same way that Borders and Barnes & Noble brushed off Amazon. But ignore this one at major potential peril. This market is getting really smart. It is playing with it and having fun. It's very likely to reach point where a company may send out a press release which is so bad that the market will turn on the company and take it down. Remember the movie "Network" when the guys says: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." That's our message. We would love to come away with millions of signatures on Cluetrain which we could then show to the corporate world and say: this is front-line market research that you're not getting from Gartner, or Forester, or Giga, or Datapro or any of those guys. We want to put it in their face and say: understand this or die. Actually we think the Manifesto is rather profound and that it will gate how up to two or three trillion dollars in e- commerce flow over the next three to five years.

If We Are Right Empires Are Going to Crash

Our question is: yes, but who will be the beneficiaries? Here is a binary way to view Cluetrain. If we are wrong about these things, you can laugh at us. We will have had no impact and will have been just a little blip on the Internet -- a bunch of guys jumping up and down and waiting their hands around. And who cares? Because we were wrong. But, if we are right, empires are going to crash based on what we are saying, and new ones are going to rise. However it is unlikely that the Amazon model will be repeated 1000 times. I think much smaller companies will be replicated -- millions of times. You know three or four or five or six people who can make a really good livelihood with a very small niche.

COOK Report: And, as long as you have a ubiquitous and resilient communications system like the Internet capable of connecting all those niche operations, the economy not only survives but prospers.

Locke: The economy not only survives, it is a lot healthier. Today you may have a lot of companies converging through large mergers but the process of their doing this speaks against the human voice that powers Cluetrain.

A lot of people who read the Cluetrain manifesto will scan through the individual statements and find that they agree with most all of them. But if you also try to read it a bit more slowly and really critically, I think you will find that the pieces add up to a lot more than 95 simple statements.

COOK Report: What they do add up to is what we're been talking about right here. Remember Soshanna Zuboff's mid-'80s book called In the Age of the Smart Machine? They are she became the first person to point out how computer systems could threaten and do away with middle management. When we are seeing now than at the end of the '90s with the success of the Internet is the Internet doing away with the intermediary between the creator and the consumer.

Locke: That's true and people refer to it as disintermediation. Trying to predict cause and effect for all this is difficult but likely to be worthwhile. Consider the meme that underlies those of Cluetrain. It is the question of the relationship of the Internet global economy. I am saying that the Internet did not drive the forces making up the global economy because those forces were already in place when the Internet came along. The Internet basically served as a catalyst that speeded them up and glued them altogether.

The message of Cluetrain is also gluing together a lot of otherwise disparate views. They range from those of Eric Raymond, the anarchist-oriented founder of the open software movement to those of Ruth Perkins CAIS, Florida Department of law-enforcement who wrote in her Cluetrain sign up: "thank you for solidifying all the thoughts and mission I've had for so long. I am a wholehearted signer and practitioner of your manifesto." The Cluetrain Manifesto is a message with which the whole family can play.

There are two styles of doing Intranet's. One is the bottom up approach where you get people who are really focused on skunk works projects, and on getting mind-share and buy-in to be used in building consensus for things that they are really turned on about. Now this style, driven by true enthusiasm, is really like the human voice that we talk about in our manifesto. But you also have the other kind of style. This is very much top-down, very much like Lotus Notes only running on TCP/IP. It is run by the "happy-talk" of the corporate PR department. Its idea of creativity is to make available to everyone things like the Human Resources manuals and the cafeteria schedules. It is one where the companies process their employees. And it is one that does not fly very well because people feel, and rightly so, that they are being subjected to broadcast. Attempts to do this within the organization have been fraught with command and control issues: do this; don't do that and so on.

Now if you want to talk intranets, I've got a good war story there. Back in '94, when I was doing MecklerWeb, Dun & Bradstreet was one of my core partners. I would be invited then on regular e-commerce sessions that they would have with IBM and other large clients. There was a fellow there named Ted Wolf who was head of the IT group and who managed Dun & Bradstreet Information Systems. Ted gave a presentation to this group right on the heels of a fellow from Lotus Notes who had given a really slick PowerPoint presentation. Ted stood up and said: let me see if I have this straight. this will cost 500 bucks a seat, right? The Lotus Notes guy answers: at a minimum. Ted continued: and it's going to need corporate buy off so an entire IT study will have to be done on needs and requirements.

And then Ted looks at his watch and says: let's see. It's 3 clock now. I have a pretty small unit with D and B -- some 350 people. You know, before the end of the day here I could download the CERN Web server. Have it in place. Put HTML templates out to everyone. Send some email. And he goes: you know it wouldn't have all the bells and whistles of Lotus Notes, but when people come to work on Monday morning, it's in place and its free. I think you have a real selling problem with Lotus Notes. (IBM had recently bought to Lotus Notes and I was just beginning to realize they'd bought it at the end of it's life-cycle. Of course, being IBM, it probably took them another two or three years to realize this.)

But Ted wasn't finished. "This is in fact what we've done," he concludes. He then goes on to give a presentation about how a core team in his group got really excited about the Web. They knew nothing about it. But they went from zero to 180 and built an intranet that was sucking information from all over Dun & Bradstreet; filtering it; putting it together. With no previous experience or background they did the whole thing in only six weeks.

Unfortunately right around then the notion of intranets caught the attention of the corporate higher ups. Suddenly it was: "here come the suits." At first Wolfe's people thought that the suits would give them the resources they needed to take it the rest of the way. After all, they were gung-ho -- working 18 hours today because they owned the project. But instead of supporting them the suits brought in the lawyers and marketing people. Suddenly, he said, it was no longer "ours". They took away from us and we couldn't do anything without six levels of approval. Everyone became totally discouraged and bailed out of the project because it was no fun any more. And in this meeting, right in front of me he is talking to them face-to-face and saying: you know you wrecked the best thing that we'd ever done. You wrecked it because you came in and took it away from us and put it in the hands of people who don't understand how it works.