Net Attitude

Net Attitude has reached a new status - the entire book is now available to read for free here on patrickWeb. This is something I have wanted to offer for a long time but in the prior years my publisher would not allow it. I believe studies have shown that books that are made free to read on the Internet actually get incremental sales -- sales of the book that would not otherwise have happened. Perhaps the protective attitude (lack of Net Attitude) of publishers is why they are in the soup.

I wrote Net Attitude during the summer of 2001 and it was published in November of that year. The timing was not good as at that point business, management, and technology books were not selling much for obvious reasons. However, the book was published both in the U.S. and also outside the U.S. in Chinese, Italian, and UK English. After roughly 30,000 copies, the book sold out, althought there are some new copies floating around and selling on Amazon. There is also a version available for the Kindle and now the new version right here on patrickWeb. My thanks to Andy Grachuk at JingotheCat Web Design for creating the Web compilation.

2001 was a long time ago but not as long ago as 1994 when Tom Brokaw appeared on " Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" to talk about "Early Reports About the Internet". I was in Las Vegas at the conference that Brokaw refers to and the camera caught me with a few comments (see video). Bill Gates got most of the attention, understandably, but it is sad to hear that Brokaw called Gates one of the "founding geniuses of this new technology". That same year both Bill Gates and I gave presentations at an IDG conference in Paris. Gates said the Internet was too slow and too insecure to be used for business. Needless to say, my speech represented the opposite point of view and was in the same camp as Eric Schmidt (then at Sun) who said that every business, large or small, will be on the Internet.

Thanks to Julie Moran Alterio,Technology and business reporter at The Journal News for telling me about the Brokaw video. She called it "A blast from your past". Meanwhile, with regard to Net Attitude....

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June 14, 2009 09:31 PM