• by Larry Dobrow , December 10, 2003

The great Satchel Paige once famously said, "Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you." And while Paige pitched baseballs rather than products, it seems that many Internet marketers and pundits have taken his advice to heart, rarely stopping to consider the lessons of years past.

This notion - that webheads pay more attention to breathless pronouncements about future projects than to the past decisions that got them to where they are - struck Agency.com's Andy Hobsbawm as somewhat strange. But rather than wag his finger sternly and reiterate the oft-quoted refrain about those who cannot remember the past being doomed to repeat it, Hobsbawm decided to record his thoughts more formally. The result: "Ten Years On: The State of the Internet a Decade After Mosaic," a comprehensive examination of the Internet's impact on society and business. [Mosaic, technophiles might recall, was the first graphical Web browser.]

Hobsbawm, Agency.com's European managing director, admits that part of his motivation for the project was personal. "I went through the insane roller coaster that was the 1990s, and I'm still a little bit sheepish about all the irrational exuberance," he admits. That said, Hobsbawm's primary agenda is to recapture the "spirit of inquiry" that characterized the early days of the Internet era. "After all the smoke cleared from the crash of 2000, everybody went back to 'hey, business as usual' right away. There's a whole lot of questions about what happened back then that we don't have answers for yet."

The report contains a series of big-picture essays on topics ranging from the economy and globalization to freedom and content. Especially entertaining is a look back at ten proclamations made in the days before the Internet boom; odds are that 3Com founder Robert Metcalfe might like a mulligan on his 1995 prediction that the Internet "will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."

"Reading those now is a little bit unfair," Hobsbawm concedes. "But by bringing them up, maybe we stir up some debate again. That's the only way you make sense of things."

It goes without saying that Hobsbawm has an opinion or two about the current state of Internet marketing. Unlike many other tech-first pundits, however, he isn't especially quick to dismiss tenets of traditional marketing as irrelevant and antiquated. "Ironically, the traditional rules of marketing still apply if you do them right," he explains. "Look at Amazon's personalized recommendations: 'If you just bought this, you might like this and this and this.' That's almost exactly how it's been for years, the right person at the right time in the right place with the right message."

Hobsbawm believes that companies like Amazon, Yahoo!, and eBay have thrived for a single reason: they understood sooner than their peers that the currency of successful business online is communication. "The Internet is a communal culture," he notes. "Look at eBay - basically what they do is set people up, then get out of the way."

In fact, that's a piece of advice Hobsbawm might give to all Internet marketers. Unsuccessful Web ad models, he believes, share one trait in common: they interrupt users' online experience at a time when they're otherwise engaged. "When people are online, they're focused on specific goals. Marketing that happens in this context cannot divert them from the task at hand." He again points to Amazon as one of the savviest companies in this regard, noting that the company's aforementioned recommendations are anything but intrusive.

As for what's next, Hobsbawm is not one to make big-picture predictions. A student of the Internet's history rather than a futurist, he allows only that new skills will be needed and new jobs created "as people figure out what the hell the Internet really is." He hopes, however, that as technology continues its advance, businesses will rethink the way they are organized.

"The Internet hasn't been revolutionary yet, like electricity or railroads in the 19th century," he says. "What it's done so far is allow us to do the things we already did, but differently and more efficiently. People are still exchanging photos; now they're doing it digitally." As for his own fate ten years on, he dryly quips that he'll "probably be a floating, disembodied brain or plugged directly into a network."

The full "Ten Years On" report can be accessed at www.agency.com/10yearson.