Net Attitude
- Article 28 of 77
- Information Age, February 2002
From IBM's Internet guru, yet another ebusiness make-over book that's behind its time.
If The Internet for Dummies had not already been published, John Patrick would have had the perfect title for his first book. Instead, we have Net Attitude, a bluffer's guide to the Internet, web services and ecommerce for the CEO and CIO who somehow managed to sleep through 1998 to 2001.
Patrick, IBM's current vice president of Internet technology, seems to have a runaway enthusiasm for the web, the Internet and all things beginning with the letter 'e'. The collapse of hundreds of dot-coms in 2000 and 2001, according to Patrick, was merely the weeding out of a few badly maintained companies. In a little while, he insists, all will be rosy again: two billion people will have Internet access; broadband will be widely available thanks to “the invisible hand of Adam Smith”; technology will help the speech-disordered to speak and the blind to surf the web with ease; and even immortality and time travel will be within our reach, thanks to infinite computer memory and limitless data storage.
After the whirlwind tour of the virtual world has passed through digital signatures, instant messaging and wireless networking (with the author never missing a chance to sing the IBM corporate song along the way), Patrick spends the final two chapters focusing on practical steps for readers who want to e-enable their companies. By contrast with the rest of the book, these chapters prove to offer some sound advice. In fact, prospective readers of Net Attitude are advised to skip directly to these instead of lingering on earlier chapters, which offer little more than slogans and disturbing glimpses into Patrick's life of Internet-enabled picture frames, online light-bulb forums, “pepper-ball” filling and jury-rigging hotel telephone lines for low-speed email access.
Nevertheless, Patrick's faltering grasp of life outside the US - despite the occasional throwaway criticism of US companies that suffer from the same problem - does tarnish his supposed guru-dom. How can we trust the advice he offers when he also proclaims that WAP is catching on strongly in Europe, and that the future offers a world where mobile phone users in the UK will receive text messages offering “early-bird specials” at the pub on the “corner of Chestnut and Main, less than two blocks [away]”, thanks to geographic positioning technologies? Will we even want companies to be e-enabled if we have to submit to having adverts beamed to our Bluetooth-enabled phones from petrol pumps while we fill up, a prospect that seems to fill Patrick with delight?
Any technology decision-maker who is not already looking at how Internet technologies could be helping his or her business should be doing so immediately. But there are plenty of books on the market that can offer better advice without the IBM marketing spin and the unquestioning adoration for anything e-business.