The challenge is how to operationalize in the new rules. Everybody takes credit for productivity. But the reality is that productivity in the New Economy model is the reinvention of work. The old-cos are valued in the stock exchange by their Price to Earnings, so reducing expense can increase profits, which is positive. Their revenues are the old-co's expense.
Internet is an enabler so companies can work with business partners.
Speed and flexibility are at a premium, not self-sufficiency as we've seen in the past. You never know if your workforce are your employees, your partner's employees or are free agents. The Internet allows all those people to co-mingle in a virtual sense. Meaning that there is a parallel universe that is emerging that says that if you can transform your product benefits into a service deliverable that you have a model for doing business, that as Carolyn was pointing out, where systems are the essential perspective of the new economy, where services are easier to deliver in a systems model than products are. So you see huge investment being made in the infrastructure to deal with what we'll need.