Idea 49 - Web 2.0 With a few far-sighted exceptions, business is slow to wake up to the new. When it does, however, it devours it. A handful of early movers turn a new idea into a competitive advantage until everyone else catches up. Then the new becomes the norm and the field is levelled once again. That is as true for communications technology as for anything else, perhaps more so - business turned the telegraph, telephone, telex and fax machine to its purposes. Now comes the Internet and all that flows from it. But some believe (the most dangerous four words in the business vocabulary, others say) that 'this time it's different'. Ideas about the communications possibilities of packet-switching and networking surfaced at MIT in the early 1960s, and the first network with computers communicating over a phone line was built in 1965. But it was the 1980s before business began to scent possibilities, and the first Interop trade fair showcasing the Internet was...