It's all tosh, of course. The new economy has more to it than speculative deals and opportunistic business plans. For most businesses, the new economy means changing business plans to realise assets that were previously overlooked because the technology to exploit them was not available. The biggest asset that most companies possess is information, whether it is embodied in the knowledge and experience of its employees, or is simply in the form of information on what it sells. Both these areas will receive increased attention next year.
All large companies have vast amounts of information.
To help firms cope with this increase, Microsoft and Lotus among others are preparing knowledge management platforms. And you can ignore all the scare stories about people abandoning the Web. These stories are for the most part generated by piecemeal research picked up by the members of the national press looking for good headlines. As the papers report, people may indeed be worried about security, not everybody has Internet access yet, and many of those who do are still waiting for flat-rate access. But things are changing.