it working sooner. The rush to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and CRM systems, plus the movement of both business-to- customer (B-to-C) and business-to-business (B-to-B) transactions to the Internet, was valuable to those companies which made sure the new information technology (IT) sys- tems benefited their businesses. In general, money was not the constraining factor. Time, in relation to the speed of the competition, was. Even more so, quality was driver. Systems that did the right thing and worked reliably helped businesses grow. In the current economy, it is not clear what is best for business. It is certain that there will be fewer efforts to push into the use of new technology. It is likely that these efforts will be smaller and that the successful ones will do a lot of early work to try to ensure the business value of the chosen application of technology. One consultant re- ports that requests for proposals for IT development work are coming in months ear- lier than usual. He believes that internal managers are being more diligent to ensure successful use of funds in the current economy. Surveys from the first half of 2002 suggest that always-on e-mail may be the crucial business application for 3G wireless services. However, the same studies also indicate that businesses are not very interested, at least not yet. Most think that high-speed landline access is more valuable. Road warriors will meet during the day and take care of their e-mail in the evening at the hotel, appreciating the fact that the hotel moved from modem-speed connections to high-speed Internet access just recently. As many businesses take the wait-and-see or the wait-until-we-have-more-money ap- proach, competition is growing. The Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11b wireless ethernet standard is trying to offer high-speed Internet access in key public hot spots, business and travel centers that call for high usage. An innovative alternative to cellular recently demon- strated an ability to provide high-speed data access in the tens of megabits-per-