Just as there supposedly is a fine line in the human brain between love and hate, there seems to be a razor-thin difference between brilliantly innovative ideas and supremely dumb ones. I say that because, as our cover feature ["Dumb and Dumber Ideas" ] shows, some smart people have been doing things that have turned out to be really silly.

The article covers what the author calls "four of the most misleading and ruinous" ideas of the Internet Age. Among them:

Bill Gates’s bet that Microsoft could go beyond its expertise in software and generate compelling information and articles for its Web sites. Microsoft was so cocky about its capabilities that Nathan Myhrvold, its chief strategist at the time, called the nation’s elite media companies "road kill on the information highway." Wrong.

Uber-venture capitalist John Doerr’s vision that America’s homes would quickly buy broadband services to gain fast access to the Internet. The broadband company he helped start, now known as Excite@Home, took more than three years longer than predicted to reach a million customers and ran up huge losses.

We don’t necessarily seem to have learned much from the painful lessons that failures such as these have inflicted. In The Great Lie ["Smart Homes? A Stupid Idea"], Larry Keeley shows that people who are promoting the home-automation fad are thinking about innovation in precisely the wrong way. In The Last Word ["It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Ad World,"], legendary admen Jerry Della Femina and Sergio Zyman say that Internet businesses built on the prospect of ad revenue will never work—and there are lots of them.

What to do?

Jim Breyer, managing partner of venture-capital firm Accel Partners, says in our interview ["2nd and Foremost"] not to worry if you weren’t the first mover. He says there are plenty of opportunities to still succeed in the Internet Age. He describes a strategy for "carve-outs," pulling assets out of big corporations and putting them into stand-alone corporations so they can act like agile start-ups.

Some guidelines by which corporations can build successful so-called e-ventures within their walls are laid out in the CEO User’s Guide ["Protecting Your Young"]. Tim Rohner argues large companies should create a corporate office that nurtures nascent e-ventures to either a long and successful existence or a mercifully early demise. This structure also prevents good ideas from being smothered by corporate antibodies.

In Digital Strategy ["Cutting the Wires"], Dominic Endicott explains how companies can use wireless technology to create killer apps. In a feature ["The Right Tool"], Joanne Kelley shows how Ace Hardware built an online community of its dealers that it is using to great advantage.

Lest you think we believe the Web is the answer to all problems, read Roger Fillion’s feature ["Performing Without a ’Net"]. He finds some amazing characters who have never sent an e-mail or sat down at a personal computer, even though expense is no object for them. One, historian David McCullough (whose genial presence is frequently seen on PBS specials), tells why he continues to write on the 1940 Royal upright typewriter that he used on his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Truman, among other books.

Which reinforces the principle that it is the soundness of the ideas themselves that counts, not the technologies that bring them to us.

Cheers,

Paul B. Carroll
Editor-in-Chief