David Wyld

Since DARPA (the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) laid the foundation for the Internet and Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (no, Al Gore had nothing whatsoever to do with it!), one thing has been a constant as the online world has evolved: What you think is likely to happen is not what actually happens. In instance after instance in the now decades-long history of the Internet, the so-called "experts" and futurists—with the accuracy that makes futurism a field that literally anyone can be an authority in—have been consistently wrong in anticipating how the Web would develop and who the winners and the losers might be because of that.

Now two decades ago, in a Fortune article aptly titled" "E or Be Eaten," Stewart Alsop wrote:

The university library. For those of us of a certain age, many, many an hour was spent there. When we walked uphill through the snow - bothways, of course - to do research, there was simply no alternative. The university library was the place to be. It was where all research started. When you needed to do research, the library - not the World Wide Web - was your source of all information. Yes, it was also a social place and a study space, but more than anything else, the purpose of the library was clear: It had "the stuff" you needed to research anything - and there really was no alternative!

We hear a great deal today about the "yield curve inversion"... and yes, it is a big deal!

“We don’t have balls. But we know how to use them.”

This was one of those stories that just made you watch—even when you didn't want to. Unfortunately, it involves animal cruelty—of the worst kind. And yes, it involves a brand that had been rocketing to prominence over the past few years—a brand that has a wholesome image and was based on "doing things right." To put it academically, this was what we might rightly call an "uh-oh!" situation!