James Gosling, Java co-creator and now CTO of Sun's Developer Products group, concurs that we have maybe all been too hasty in dismissing the Internet and e-commerce as a mere "bubble."

Writing yesterday in his popular blog, he says: 

"There are a great pair of articles in the most recent Economist magazine: "The dotcoms come of age" and "A perfect market." They describe the incredible current success of the Internet. Here's a brief quote:

BACK in 1999, at the height of the internet frenzy, Forrester, a research company, forecast that online retail sales in America could reach $100 billion by 2002. When the bubble burst a year later, lots of crazy predictions went the same way as many dotcom firms. But if online sales of cars, food and travel are added to the official figures, then Forrester's forecast, which once looked so wild, has turned out to be only about a year late. The growth continues. The 200m Americans who now have web access are likely to spend more than $120 billion online this year. And that is only part of the story. E-commerce has not only grown into a huge thing in its own right, it has done so in a way that will change every kind of business, offline as well as online, as our survey explains."