inluminent

Jimmy Guterman has posted a long entry on his weblog discussing three management lessons from the dot com era:

1. Things have changed for good. AOL’s current distress notwithstanding, surveys suggest that the number of new people on the Net is increasing every month, most dramatically outside North America. The current bandwidth overcapacity won’t be a permanent problem. More and more companies are doing more of their business over the Net, which means there are still many infrastructure opportunities. For example, most commerce-related Web sites are still way too complicated and unreliable. Those who build on the fine usability and architecture work done at Amazon, eBay, and a handful of other firms will be on the right track.

2. The Web is only the beginning. The savvier dot-com entrepreneurs understood that the Web may be the universal interface, but it was a means, not an end. The Web is a front end to everything from remote database retrieval to online collaboration. More and more companies are standardizing on Web-based applications that were once handled by other clients (everything from e-mail to terminal access). And recent efforts to expand what is available on the Web, like the Semantic Web project, suggest that there’s much more to do on the basic Web than just point and click.

3. Some projects can succeed only if they start big. It’s become fashionable to attack the fallen dot-com heroes for hubris, but sometimes what seems to be hubris is ambition. Google, for example, would not have succeeded if it tried to encompass one topic, then another, then another. Its impact was so great because its offering was so impressive and all-encompassing early on. Hail Mary passes remain risky, but sometimes they do lead to the end zone.

[emphasis is mine]

I think Jimmy’s three lessons are good ones to keep in mind in your own day to day management struggles…