But oddly, that was the case. Certainly, there were signs of the slowdown, concerns that the industry that made it possible for tens of thousands of us to shed the skin of unemployed or underemployed liberal arts graduates or corporate hallrats was going through a radical transition phase, bringing a future that looks cold and forbidding to CFOs and market analysts everywhere. This year, however, saw as much earnest reflection on how to avoid the mistakes of the past as how to exploit the potential of the future. As such, it has a tendency to believe itself capable of reconciling the often conflicting goals of free-form expression and creative ferment on the one hand, and meeting the bottom line on the other. It's as though our industry needs just such an object lesson, a reminder that sometimes you have to make do with what you have and see if you can succeed in meeting your objectives, above the clamorous din of objections on the grounds of inelegance and wastefulness or flying in the face of established traditions.
Ripples travel faster in a connected medium.
For those who don't know how Ethernet works, perhaps a metaphorical overview is in order. This older system used radio signals in a scheme that allowed stations to share a frequency. The assumption was that even without knowing when the next transmission would start, any station had a pretty good likelihood of successfully sending a transmission before another began. Put simply, in the model for Ethernet lies the secret to understanding how the Web industry is going to survive despite the shakeouts of the past six months. When an industry such as ours, fed by dreams of incredible wealth and a revolution in the ways that businesses communicate with themselves, with each other, and with their customers, suffers from an inability to achieve perfection, perhaps it's time to consider simply making things work when we can't make them work well.