"What is the Internet for?" asked Weinberger. It wasn't a trick question, but not an easy one either. "A telephone is for calling people. Highways are for going places. What is the Web for? I haven't heard an answer. Why does the growth curve look like a hockey stick with the fastest vertical acceptance line since the discovery of fire? Why are we rushing to this thing that we have no idea what it's for? Something deep is going on."

The answer to that question goes far beyond business, and it changes everything about how we do business. "The Web offers us our voice back," is Weinberger's conclusion. "We are not on the Web because we want a better shopping experience. It's not because we have electronic catalogues instead of those old, stupid, paper catalogs. What's doing it is connections. We want to connect with one other. We want to connect with other people as ourselves."

That's why, in the New Economy, markets are conversations, not demographic reports. It's big picture stuff.

"We live in this split-apart world," opened Locke, "where you hear people talking about 'my job' and 'my life' as if those really were two different things." It's been a historical progression from the Industrial Revolution to Organization Man; from interchangeable parts, to interchangeable workers, to interchangeable consumers. He may have begun by sounding a little cosmic, but Locke's message was ultimately, eminently practical—in an interconnected, global market with an explosion of options and where individuals can talk to each other anytime, business must start treating customers as people and allies, not consumers.

Traditional business is hierarchical, and traditional business communications are about controlling the message. That doesn't work when you have the Internet around mucking up chains of command, providing alternate routes to information and letting customers talk to each other, your employees, competitors and the media. Markets are conversations, not lectures.

When did 'marketing' become a verb? In the earliest days, markets were places to go, not just to pick up vegetables for tonight's dinner, but to get the latest news, gossip and debate. To meet people. Weinberger said, "It was filled with the sound of human voice. It's where civilization actually grew up. Somehow, in the 20th century, now the 21st, it got turned into 'marketing,' something you do to people, and you do it to them against their will."

"What gets marketed to consumers are messages," he said. "The only flaw in this is, there is no market for messages."

Opportunity in the New Economy isn't so much about bandwidth and technology, although those things are certainly important for creating economic opportunities on the Net. In the larger picture, it's about companies releasing their struggle for control—control of the message, the process, the organization and the people. And companies don't have a choice, because the millions of people on the Internet are not in their control. Those which can adapt, will succeed. They'll form conversations in which real people talk to each other.

Said Locke, for example, on the question of how Internet marketers use data they collect about buyers, "If what we get from companies is connecting the dots and facilitating the conversation, there would be far less concern that we are being targeted for spam and advertising."

No one was as surprised as Petzinger, for example, when he began printing his email address in his columns. Yes, he received volumes of mail which he had to read and respond too, but his readers also became millions of new eyes and ears. "It was virtually all incredibly intelligent, thoughtful and well written—with the occasional flame, but you need that to make life interesting," he said. "A dialogue began, and it actually shaped how I began to do that column. The boundary between me and my readers had begun to dissolve."

Mario Morino, who wrapped up the event, relies on a technique he calls pulsing. "There is no longer a need," he said, "for any company or organization to make a decision completely internally again." Whether you are in research, customer support, sales or any other decision-making role, it's foolish to keep it inside the conference room. Go out and ask for help. "That's the cultural challenge," he said. "Are we big enough, strong enough and do we have the confidence to carry on that dialogue.?"

If the end of business as usual means the end of top-down control, it also means the end of secrets, and according to Locke, "The biggest secret that business is trying to hide from the market, is that we are human; we are fallible; we make mistakes; we are not perfect." The underlying message of the Cluetrain Manifesto is to break old habits, but that's hard to do, even for the cutting-edge entrepreneurs who are immersed in Internet innovation. "You get your first VC money and you start talking like General Motors. Stop that!"