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AuthorITies: Matter Of Fact


July 12, 1999

Curing An E-Addiction

By Rusty Weston

H ave you or a loved one been diagnosed with an E-disease? It's not a virus or an infection, it's an addiction. The symptoms are not only impossible to conceal, innocent bystanders claim that they're painful to watch. E-addicts become obsessed with finding words to slam an "E" in front of, and not just familiar phrases such as "services" or "business" or "commerce." Who else but an E-addict would dream up duds such as "E-mgr," "E-talk," or "E-IT"?

These are the same folks who once advocated putting "cyber" in front of every product, and years ago found mystical meaning in the word "techno." They typically lose focus in long meetings.

The real problem here is that the letter E is cheapening information technology. You go to college to study computer science only to wake up one day and find yourself working in E-biz. For my money, E-biz is remarkably close to showbiz (and I'm pausing right now to see if the domain name ebiztoday.com is taken. Drat: It looks like Ted Turner has beaten me to it).

Eventually we'll get over this condition, won't we? Or will historians one day speak of the late '90s as the start of the "A.E." period, denoting the words "After E." You can tell your grandkids you were around when the letter "E" changed digital life as we know it. (Some of us are technically pre-E, or in E-denial, but that's another story. Let's see if E-2000 is available -- or perhaps 2000AE.com?)

It's sad to realize that even now, people are being born and will never know what life was like Before E (B.E.). I was born in the late '50s, which was way B.E. Of course, by the time I went to college we had portable electric typewriters, and eventually computer terminals, but we still used filing cabinets to save documents and albums to store photographs. Who knew that one day we'd be able to "configure" rather than test-drive automobiles? Who knew that one day we'd no longer be able to post a letter to customer service and instead would have to send in an "E-mail"?

Don't get me wrong: I think E-business is the future. I believe that 1,000 years from now anthropologists will argue over the exact number of businesses that were "Amazoned" out of existence. I also believe that every consultant who doesn't claim that companies without E-storefronts are doomed to fail is himself doomed to fail.

What about the 65% of companies that aren't engaged in E-commerce? Are thousands of companies doomed to fail by the millennium as so many pundits have foretold? I think not. The E-risk averse ought to add E to their product line and spin off a tracking stock.

The truth is I'm suffering from an E-addiction, too, but I'm doing something about it! I'm going on the Web right now to see if that domain name is E-vailable.

Rusty Weston is managing editor of InformationWeek Research.


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