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John Chambers, President & CEO, Cisco Systems
Robert Litan, Vice President and Director of Economic Studies and Cabot Family Chair in Economics, The Brookings Institution
The Internet is dead! Long live the Internet! As the dot-com industry goes from boom to bust in the time it takes to say "irrational exuberance", we are left with one overriding question: how will the Internet affect the economy in the years ahead?
The answer, of course, many argue is: quite a lot. As the economist Robert Litan puts it in this discussion with Cisco chief John Chambers, "If the Internet is like electricity, it is not just some fad that just happened one day and then just disappeared."
Chambers, whose company recently announced its first round of layoffs, offers a personal take on the nature of the downturn.
He says that "the first thing we learned is that the 100-year flood can occur, and the depth of that flood is not five feet up the level of the house where you keep sandbags in your basement. It was over the house."
But ultimately, both Litan and Chambers line up with those who are very, very bullish about the impact of the Internet on the economy in general. The next few years will decide if their outlook is prophecy or wishful thinking.
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