The Rules Of Engagement

Late in 1999 I was at this rather posh party, the kind where glitterati lurk in corners and everybody speaks with the sort of intonation you can only acquire through mixing equal and large measures of the Bombay Gymkhana Club and the Ivy League. And everybody was talking about the dotcom he/she was starting. I lost the plot a bit when the tenth person came up to me with, "This amazing idea, dude."

As I swabbed the remains of my beer out of my nose, I reflected on two things: I had to learn not to splutter in polite company, and that the dotcom mantra really, but really, had to be too good to be true if people had begun toting start-ups like they were fashion accessories.

I then forgot all about my dotcom prescience until drkoop.com and company announced they were running out of money in February 2000, and the world began to realise that the dotcom edifice had been largely built on some pretty perilous commercial foundations.

The inevitable overreaction has set in, and now many people wouldn't touch a dotcom with a bargepole. Which is silly, because there a few companies that are doing lots of things right.

Our correspondents K. Jayadev and R. Srinivas set about locating these companies, and found there are very clear lessons to be learned from their success. Lessons that we think successful companies in the Internet-enabled, dotcom and e-commerce areas will be using for some time to come.

You can read about them in our cover feature, "Dotcom Survival Guide". It's the first of a series of stories we'll be doing that highlight best practice in IT and associated industries. Every issue, we would like to highlight what we think is right-or worth learning from-about a company's strategy, tactics, product/service offering or management.

Once again, we're giving you a CD with content that ties in nicely with the cover feature. The Computers Today Guide to e-Commerce has been specially produced for Computers Today readers by SSI group company Inndsoft Systekh. You'll learn all the basics of e-commerce, a grounding that, as our cover feature says, many Web-based business ventures never seemed to have. I hope you find it useful.

Our Chief Guest for this month is Pradeep Singh, the founder and CEO of customer relationship management major Talisma. Though US-based, Talisma is promoted by an Indian and has a development centre in Bangalore. To that extent it has a fairly legitimate claim to being one of the first companies with a strong India connection and a strong international brand. Hopefully there will be several more soon.

Also in this issue you'll find a review of the IT job market. The news isn't great, alas. However, the industry consensus was that the recruitment slowdown, though severe, was only temporary. And then a horrific terrorist strike may well turn out to have changed everything. Though hopefully not. My call is that the economic system that was in part under attack is more resilient than we think, and that business will come back stronger than before.

Hari Menon
<editor@computers-today.com>