SPAN: September/October 1998

September/October 1998

SPAN New Rulesfor the New Economy

By Kevin Kelly Publisher Francis B. Ward

Space Aged

Editor-in-Chief Donna J. Roginski

By Thomas Mallon

Editor Lea Terhune Associate Editor Arun Bhanot Copy Editor A. Venkata Narayana

A Connecticut Yankee in India

Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar

By Sunil Sethi

The Fabindia Story

Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar

How Much Computer For $l,OOO?

Deputy Art Director Hemant Bhamagar

For $2,500?

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

Lee Waisler-Gravitating

to India

By Keshav Malik

Research Services USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library

Consumer AdvocacyA Growing Influence

Front cover: This collage by SPAN studio combines diverse images of consumerism as captured through the lens of Hemant Bhatnagar. See story on page 33.

Photographs: Front cover-Hemant Bhatnagar. 1O-15-courtesy the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, l7-courtesy the Bissell family. 21Hemant Bhatnagar. 25-32-courtesy Lee Waisler. 33-37-Hemant Bhatnagar. 46Chip Simons.

50-courtesy Darius Taraporvala. 51 & 54-Waseem Khan. 59Hemam Bhatnagar.

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manuscripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted.

By Arun Bhanot

Classic Reading: Who Is the Consumer?

International Cooperation Against Corruption

By Robert Klitgaard ,

Corporate Spy Wars

By William J. Holstein

Staring into Space

By David E. Graham

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Endangered Language

By Dawn Stover

A LETTER

T

FROM

he status of the consumer in the United States is something that evolved along with the industrial revolution. The days of caveat emptor, or "let the buyer beware"-when purchasers had only their ovvn common sense and discrimination to protect them from cheats and shoddy goods-continued in America until this century. Change came about through legislation and enforcement of consumer protection laws, often the result of hard-fought battles of activists. Change also came with the recognition that the better product sells best in a competitive market. New campaigns are being waged today on behalf of the consumer in new contexts: cyberspace, for instance.

Scientific advances inform consumers and manufacturers in an ever-changing scenario.

This issue's cover story package explores consumer advocacy in America and also looks at some of the methods that have been applied in India by consumer activists here. Arun Bhanot's article "Consumer Advocacy: A Growing Movement" takes a broad look at the growth of the consumer protection movement, particularly in America and India. A taste of how American consumer organizations keep service providers and manufacturers on their toes is offered in the article from Consumer Reports, regarded as a consumer Bible by many Americans. This magazine and its annual buyer's guide have kept shoppers savvy for decades by exhaustively surveying, testing and rating products from automobiles to dishwashers to hotel chains. Consumer Reports-which accepts no advertising to insure its independence-is published by probably the most successful consumer organization in the United States, the Consumers Union. "How Much Computer for $1000? For $2000?" is an example of the kind of thorough research Consumer Reports undertakes.

Both consumers and providers are being affected dramatically as computer technology and the Internet re-create trade. Kevin Kelly examines the changes wrought by the digital revolution upon the world economy and he offers "twelve dependable principles for thriving in a turbulent world." The rules may be welcome guidelines to those enmeshed in the Internet, "the collective interaction spun off by a trillion objects from living beings, linked together by air and glass." Kelly's precepts fly in the face of the old rules: giving away product becomes good for business and inefficiency becomes productive in "New Rules for the ew Economy."

Technology has also provided new avenues for corporate snoopers. Spying operations reminiscent of the Cold War now

THE

PUBLISHER

target the boardroom. Companies are learning to protect their business secrets, which are worth a hefty price to rivals. In "Corporate Spy Wars," WilliamJ. Holstein gives away some of the spies' secrets of success and tells what big business is doing about industrial espionage.

Someone who held his customers and suppliers in special regard was the late John Bissell, who, with his wife Bim, founded Fabindia, Inc. In the nearly 40years of its life, Fabindia has become synonymous with excellence and value for money. It was a trendsetter, too, ushering in a new appreciation for ethnic textiles. John Bissell himself-unpreposmuch sessing yet principled person that he was-became beloved by those who knew him. Longtime friend Sunil Sethi remembers the man and profiles the business he started in ''A Connecticut Yankee in India."

Consumers must eat, and Arjun Sajnani has just the place-if you happen to be in Bangalore. Stephen Espie spins a delicious tale of how Delhi-wallah Sajnani went to New York to become an actor, and along the way became a master of nouvelle cuisine while he perfected his grasp of the theater arts. Read all about it in "Director &Chef: The Diverse RepertoryofArjun Sajnani."

Another kind of artist will be "Gravitating to India" this fall.

Well known in American art circles, American painter Lee Waislerwill exhibit his works in several Indian cities beginning in November. Some of the works are paintings executed during Waisler's stay at Sanskriti Kendra, near Delhi, earlier this year.

SPAN previews some of the paintings, and critic Keshav Malik gives an assessment of the artist.

And mundane concerns yield to forward-looking space exploration in "Space Aged" by Thomas Mallon, which chronicles the return of a "used astronaut" to the launchpad. U.S. Senator John Glenn, who was thefirst Ameri can to orbit the Earth in 1962, is in training again. He is on the roster as payload specialist in the next Space Shuttle flight, where he will assist in research on the effects of space on aging. Companion piece to this is "Staring into Space"

by David E. Graham, about one entrepreneur who is waiting in the wings to launch his business in the outer limits.

These features and more await you in this issue of SPAN. We hope you enjoy it.

Embrace dumb linear Make virtu

first

y Twelve dependable principles for thriving in a turbulent world Computer technology and the Internet are re-creating commerce. The author offers guidelines to the post -digital revolution economy, precepts that turn the old rules upside down.

The Digital Revolution gets all the headlines these days. But turning slowly beneath the fast-forward turbulence, steadily driving the gyrating cycles of cool technogadgets and gotta-haves, is a much more profound revolution-the Network Economy.

This emerging new economy represents a tectonic upheaval in our commonwealth, a social shift that reorders our lives more than mere hardware or software ever can. It has its own distinct

opportunities and its own new rules. Those who play by the new rules will prosper; those who ignore them will not.

The advent of the new economy was first noticed as far back as 1969, when Peter Drucker perceived the arrival of knowledge workers. The new economy is often referred to as the Information Economy, because of information's superior role (rather than material resources or capital) in creating wealth.

I prefer the term Network Economy, because information isn't enough to explain the discontinuities we see. We have been awash in a steadily increasing tide of information for the past century. Many successful knowledge businesses have been built on information capital, but only recently has a total reconfiguration of information itself shifted the whole economy.

The grand irony of our times is that the era of computers is over. All the major consequences of stand-alone computers have already taken place. Computers have speeded up our lives a bit, and that's it.

In contrast, all the most promising technologies making their debut now are chiefly due to communication between computers-that is, to connections rather than to computations. And since communication is the basis of culture, fiddling at this level is indeed momentous.

And fiddle we do. The technology we first invented to crunch spreadsheets has been hijacked to connect our isolated selves instead. Information's critical rearrangement is the widespread, relentless act of connecting everything to everything else. We are now engaged in a grand scheme to augment, amplify, enhance and extend the relationships and communications between all beings and all objects. That is why the Network Economy is a big deal.

The new rules governing this global restructuring revolve around several axes. First, wealth in this new regime flows directly from innovation, not optimization; that is, wealth is not gained by perfecting the known, but by imperfectly seizing the unknown. Second, the ideal environment for cultivating the unknown is to nurture the supreme agility and nimbleness of networks. Third, the domestication of the unknown inevitably means abandoning the highly successful known-undoing the perfected.

And last, in the thickening web of the Network Economy, the cycle of "find, nurture, destroy" happens faster and more intensely than ever before.

The Network Economy is not the end of history.

Given the rate of change, this economic arrangement may not endure more than a generation or two. Once networks have saturated every space in our lives, an entirely new set of rules will take hold.

Take these principles, then, as rules of thumb for the interim.

1The Law of Connection Embrace dumb power The Network Economy is fed by the deep resonance of two stellar bangs: the collapsing microcosm of chips and the exploding telecosm of connections. These sudden shifts are tearing the old laws of wealth apart and preparing territory for the emerging economy.

As the size of silicon chips shrinks to the microscopic, their costs shrink to the microscopic as well. They become cheap and tiny enough to slip into every-and the key word here is everyobject we make. The notion that all doors in a building should contain a computer chip seemed ludicrous 10 years ago, but now there is hardly a hotel door without a blinking, beeping chip.

Soon, if National Semiconductor gets its way, every FedEx package will be stamped with a disposable silicon flake that smartly tracks the contents. If an ephemeral package can have a chip, so can your chair, each book, a new coat, a basketball. Thin slices of plastic known as smart cards hold a throwaway chip smart enough to be your banker. Soon, all manufactured objects, from tennis shoes to hammers to lamp shades to cans of soup, will have embedded in them a tiny sliver of thought. And why not?

The world is populated by 200 million computers. Andy Grove of Intel happily estimates that we'll see 500 million of these by 2002. Yet the number of non-computer chips now pulsating in the world is 6 billion! They are already embedded in your car and stereo and rice cooker. Because they can be stamped out fast and cheap, like candy gumdrops, these chips are known in the industry as "jelly beans." And we are in the dawn of a jelly bean explosion: there'll be 10 billion grains of working silicon by 2005, a billion not long after. Someday each of them may be as smart as an ant, dissolved into our habitat.

As we implant a billion specks of our thought into everything we make, we are also connecting them up. Stationary objects are wired together. The nonstationary rest-that is, most manufactured objects-will be linked by infrared and radio, creating a wireless web vastly larger than the wired web. It is not necessary that each connected object transmit much data. A tiny chip plastered inside a water tank on an Australian ranch transmits only the telegraphic message of whether it is full or not. A chip on the horn of each steer beams out his pure location, nothing more: ''I'm here, I'm here." The chip in the gate at the end of the road communicates only when it was last opened: "Tuesday."

The glory of these connected crumbs is that they don't need to be artificially intelligent. Instead, they work on the dumb power of a few bits linked together. Dumb power is what you get when you network dumb nodes into a smart web. It's what our brains do with dumb neurons and what the Internet did with dumb personal computers. A PC is the conceptual equivalent of a single neuron housed in a plastic case. When linked by the telecosm into a neural network, these dumb PC nodes created that fabulous intelligence called the World Wide Web. It works in other domains: dumb parts, properly connected, yield smart results.

A trillion dumb chips connected into a hive mind is the hardware. The software that runs through it is the Network Economy. A planet of hyperlinked chips emits a ceaseless flow of small messages, cascading into the most nimble waves of sensibility. Every farm moisture sensor shoots up data, every weather satellite beams down digitized images, every cash register spits out bit streams, every hospital monitor trickles out numbers, every Web site tallies attention, every vehicle transmits its location code; all of this is sent swirling into the web. That tide of signals is the net.

The net is not just humans typing at each other on AOL, although that is part of it too and will be as long as seducing the romantic and flaming the idiotic are enjoyable.

Rather, the net is the collective interaction spun off by a trillion objects and living beings, linked together through air and glass.

This is the net that begets the Network Economy. According to Microwave Communications, Inc., the total volume of voice traffic on global phone systems will be superseded by the total volume of data traffic in three years. We're already on the way to an expanded economy full of new participants: agents, bots, objects and machines, as well as several billion more humans.

We won't wait for artificial intelligence to make intelligent systems; we'll do it with the dumb power of ubiquitous computing and pervasive connections.

The whole shebang won't happen tomorrow, but the trajectory is clear. We are connecting all to all. Every step we take that banks on cheap, rampant and universal connection is a step in the right direction. Furthermore, the surest way to advance massive connectionism is to exploit decentralized forces-to link the distributed bottom. How do you make a better bridge? Let the parts talk to each other. How do you improve lettuce farming? Let the soil speak to the farmer's tractors. How do you make aircraft safe? Let the airplanes communicate among themselves and pick their own flight paths.

In the Network Economy, embrace dumb power.

2

The Law of Plentitude

More gives more Curious things happen when you connect all to all.

Mathematicians have proven that the sum of a network increases as the square of the number of members. In other words, as the number of nodes in a network increases arithmetically, the value of the network increases exponentially. Adding a few more members can dramatically increase the value for all members.

Consider the first modern fax machine that rolled off the conveyor belt around 1965. Despite millions of dollars spent on its R&D, it was worth nothing. Zero. The second fax machine to roll off immediately made the first one worth something. There

was someone to fax to. Because fax machines are linked into a network, each additional fax machine sliding down the chute increases the value of all the fax machines operating before it.

So strong is this network value that anyone purchasing a fax machine becomes an evangelist for the fax network. "Do you have a fax?" fax owners ask you. "You should get one." Why? Your purchase increases the worth of their machine. And once you join the network, you'll begin to ask others, "Do you have a fax (or E-mail or Acrobat soft( \ \~} ware, etc.)?" Each additional account you can persuade onto the network substantially increases the value of your account.

When you go to Office Depot to buy a fax machine, you are not just buying a $200 box. You are purchasing for $200 the entire network of all other fax machines and the connections between them-a value far greater than the cost of all the separate machines.

The fax effect suggests that the more plentiful things become, the more valuable they become. But this notion directly contradicts two of the most fundamental axioms we attribute to the industrial age.

First hoary axiom: Value came from scarcity; diamonds, gold, oil and college degrees were precious because they were scarce.

Second hoary axiom: When things were made plentiful, they became devalued; carpets no longer indicated status when they could be woven by the thousands on machines.

The logic of the network flips these industrial lessons upside down. In a etwork Economy, value is derived from plentitude, just as a fax machine's value increases in ubiquity. Power comes from abundance. Copies (even physical copies) are cheap.

Therefore, let them proliferate.

Instead, what is valuable is the scattered relationshipssparked by the copies-that become tangled up in the network itself. And the relationships rocket upward in value as the parts increase in number even slightly. Windows NT, fax machines, TCPIIP, GIF images, RealAudio-all born deep in the Network Economy-adhere to this logic. But so do metric wrenches, triple-A batteries and other devices that rely on universal standards; the more common they are, the more it pays you to stick to that standard.

In the future, cotton shirts, bottles of vitamins, chain saws and the rest of the industrial objects in the world will also obey the law of plentitude as the cost of producing an additional copy of them falls steeply, while the value of the network that invents, manufactures and distributes them increases.

In the Network Economy, scarcity is overwhelmed by shrinking marginal costs. Where the expense of churning out another copy becomes trivial (and this is happening in more than software), the value of standards and the network booms.

In the Network Economy, more gives more.

3

The Law of Exponential Value

Success is nonlinear The chart of Microsoft's cornucopia of profits is a revealing graph because it mirrors several other plots of rising stars in the Network Economy. During its first 10 years, Microsoft's profits were negligible. Its profits rose above the background noise only around 1985. But once they began to rise, they exploded.

Federal Express experienced a similar trajectory: years of minuscule profit increases, slowly ramping up to an invisible threshold, and then surging skyward in a blast sometime during the early 1980s.

The penetration of fax machines likewise follows a tale of a 20-year overnight success. Two decades of marginal success, then, during the mid-1980s, the number of fax machines quietly crosses the point of no return-and the next thing you know, they are irreversibly everywhere.

The archetypical illustration of a success explosion in a Network Economy is the Internet itself. As any old-time nethead will be quick to lecture you, the Internet was a lonely (but thrilling!) cultural backwater for two decades before it hit the media radar. A graph of the number of Internet hosts worldwide, starting in the 1960s, hardly creeps above the bottom line. Then, around 1991, the global tally of hosts suddenly mushrooms, exponentially arcing up to take over the world.

Each of these curves (I owe Net Gain author John Hagel credit for these four examples) is a classic template of exponential growth, compounding in a nonlinear way. Biologists know about exponential growth; such curves are almost the definition of a biological system. That's one reason the Network Economy is often described more accurately in biological terms. Indeed, if the Web feels like a frontier, it's because for the first time in history we are witnessing biological growth in technological systems.

At the same time, each of the above examples is a classic model of the Network Economy. The compounded successes of Microsoft, FedEx, fax machines and the Internet all hinge on the prime law of networks: value explodes exponentially with membership, while this value explosion sucks in yet more members.

The virtuous circle inflates until all potential members are joined.

The subtle point from these examples, however, is that this explosion did not ignite until approximately the late 1980s.

Something happened then. That something was the dual big bangs of jelly bean chips and collapsing telco charges. It became feasible-that is, dirt cheap-to exchange data almost anywhere, anytime. The net, the grand net, began to nucleate. Network power followed.

Now that we've entered the realm where virtuous circles can

unfurl overnight successes in a biological way, a cautionary tale is in order. One day, along the beach, tiny red algae blooms into a vast red tide. Then, a few weeks later, just when the red mat seems indelible, it vanishes. Lemmings boom and disappear. The same biological forces that amplify populations can mute them.

The same forces that feed on each other to amplify network presences into powerful overnight standards can also work in reverse to unravel them in a blink. Small beginnings can lead to large results, while large disturbances have only small effects.

In the Network Economy, success is nonlinear.

4

The Law of Tipping Points

Significance precedes momentum There is yet one more lesson to take from these primeval cases of the Network Economy. And here, another biological insight will be handy. In retrospect, one can see from these expo-curves that a point exists where the momentum was so overwhelming that success became a runaway event. Success became infectious, so to speak, and spread pervasively to the extent that it became difficult for the uninfected to avoid succumbing. (How long can you hold out not having a phone?)

In epidemiology, the point at which a disease has infected enough hosts that the infection moves from local illness to raging epidemic can be thought of as a tipping point. The contagion's momentum has tipped from pushing uphill against all odds to rolling downhill with all odds behind it. In biology, the tipping points of fatal diseases are fairly high, but in technology, they seem to trigger at much lower percentages of victims or members.

There has always been a tipping point in any business, industrial or network, after which success feeds upon itself. However, the low fixed costs, insignificant marginal costs, and rapid distribution that we find in the Network Economy depress tipping points below the levels of industrial times; it is as if the new bugs are more contagious-and more potent. Smaller initial pools can lead to runaway dominance.

Lower tipping points, in turn, mean that the threshold of significance-the period before the tipping point during which a movement, growth or innovation must be taken seriouslyis also dramatically lower than it was during the industrial age. Detecting events while they are beneath this threshold is essential.

Major U.S. retailers refused to pay attention to TV homeshopping networks during the 1980s because the number of people watching and buying from them was initially so small and marginalized that it did not meet the established level of retail significance. Instead of heeding the new subtle threshold of network economics, the retailers waited until the alarm of the tipping point sounded, which meant, by definition, that it was too late for them to cash in.

In the past, an innovation's momentum indicated significance. Now, in the network environment, significance

precedes momentum.

Biologists tell a parable of the lily leaf, which doubles in size every day. The day before it completely covers the pond, the water is only half covered, and the day before that, only a quarter covered, and the day before that, only a measly eighth. So, while the lily grows imperceptibly all summer long, only in the last week of the cycle would most bystanders notice its "sudden" appearance. But by then, it is far past the tipping point.

The Network Economy is a lily pond. The Web, as one example, is a leaf doubling in size every six months. MUDs and MOOs, Teledesic phones, wireless data ports, collaborative bots and remote solid state sensors are also leaves in the network lily pond. Right now, they are just itsy-bitsy lily cells merrily festering at the beginning of a hot network summer.

In the Network Economy, significance precedes momentum.

5 The Law of Increasing Returns Make virtuous circles The prime law of networking is known as the law of increasing returns. Value explodes with membership, and the value explosion sucks in more members, compounding the result. An old saying puts it more succinctly: Them that's got shall get.

We see this effect in the way areas such as Silicon Valley grow; each new successful start-up attracts other start-ups, which in turn attract more capital and skills and yet more startups. (Silicon Valley and other high-tech industrial regions are themselves tightly coupled networks of talent, resources and opportunities.)

The law of increasing returns is far more than the textbook notion of economies of scale. In the old rules, Henry Ford leveraged his success in selling cars to devise more efficient methods of production. This enabled Ford to sell his cars more cheaply, which created larger sales, which fueled more innovation and even better production methods, sending his company to the top. While the law of increasing returns and the economies of scale both rely on positive feedback loops, the former is propelled by the amazing potency of net power, and the latter isn't. First, industrial economies of scale increase value linearly, while the prime law increases value exponentially-the difference between a piggy bank and compounded interest.

Second, and more important, industrial economies of scale stem from the herculean efforts of a single organization to outpace the competition by creating value for less. The expertise (and advantage) developed by the leading company is its alone. By contrast, networked increasing returns are created and shared by the entire network. Many agents, users and competitors together create the network's value. Although the gains of increasing returns may

be reaped unequally by one organization over another, the value of the gains resides in the greater web of relationships.

Huge amounts of cash may pour toward network winners such as Cisco or Oracle or Microsoft, but the supersaturated matrix of increasing returns woven through their companies would continue to expand into the net even if those particular companies should disappear.

Likewise, the increasing returns we see in Silicon Valley are not dependent on any particular company's success. As AnnaLee Saxenian, author of Regional Advantage, notes, Silicon Valley has in effect become one large, distributed company. "People joke that you can change jobs without changing car pools," Saxenian told Washington Post reporter Elizabeth Corcoran.

"Some say they wake up thinking they work for Silicon Valley.

Their loyalty is more to advancing technology or to the region than it is to any individual firm."

One can take this trend further. We are headed into an era when both workers and consumers will feel more loyalty to a network than to any ordinary firm. The great innovation of Silicon Valley is not the wowie-zowie hardware and software it has invented, but the social organization of its companjes and, most important, the networked architecture of the region itselfthe tangled web of former jobs, intimate colleagues, information leakage from one firm to the next, rapid company life cycles and agile E-mail culture. This social web, suffused into the warm hardware of jelly bean chips and copper neurons, creates a true Network Economy.

The nature of the law of increasing returns favors the early.

The initial parameters and conventions that give a network its very power quickly freeze into unalterable standards. The solidifying standards of a network are both its blessing and its cursea blessing because from the de facto collective agreement flows the unleashed power of increasing returns, and a curse because those who own or control the standard are disproportionately rewarded.

But the Network Economy doesn't allow one without the other. Microsoft's billions are tolerated because so many others in the Network Economy have made their collective billions on the advantages of Microsoft's increasing-returns standards.

In a Network Economy, life is tricky for consumers, who must decide which early protocol to support. Withdrawing later from the wrong network of relationships is painful-but not as painful as companies who bet their whole lives on the wrong one.

Nonetheless, guessing wrong about conventions is still better than ignoring network dynamics altogether. There is no future for hermetically sealed closed systems in the Network Economy.

The more dimensions accessible to member input and creation, the more increasing returns can animate the network, the more the system will feed on itself and prosper.

The less it allows these, the more it will be bypassed.

The Network Economy rewards schemes that allow decentralized creation and

punishes those that don't. An automobile maker in the industrial age maintains control over all aspects of the car's parts and construction. An automobile maker in the Network Economy will establish a web of standards and outsourced suppliers, encouraging the web itself to invent the car, seeding the system with knowledge it gives away, engaging as many participants as broadly as possible, in order to create a virtuous loop where every member's success is shared and leveraged by all.

In the Network Economy, make virtuous circles.

6

The Law of Inverse Pricing

Anticipate the cheap One curious aspect of the Network Economy would astound a citizen living in 1897: The very best gets cheaper each year. This rule of thumb is so ingrained in our contemporary lifestyle that we bank on it without marveling at it. But marvel we should, because this paradox is a major engine of the new economy.

Through most of the industrial age, consumers experienced slight improvements in quality for slight increases in price. But the arrival of the microprocessor flipped the price equation. In the information age, consumers quickly came to count on drastically superior quality for less price over time. The price and quality curves diverge so dramatically that it sometimes seems as if the better something is, the cheaper it will cost.

Computer chips launched this inversion, as Ted Lewis, author of The Friction Free Economy, points out. Engineers used the supreme virtues of computers to directly and indirectly create the next improved version of computers. By compounding our learning in this fashion, we got more out of less material. So potent is compounding chip power that everything it touches-cars, clothes, food-falls under its spell. Indirectly amplified learning by shrinking chips enabled just-in-time production systems and the outsourcing of very high-tech manufacturing to low-wage labor~both of which lowered the prices of goods still further.

Today, shrinking chip meets exploding net. Just as we leveraged compounded learning in creating the microprocessor, we are leveraging the same multiplying loops in creating the global communications web. We use the supreme virtues of networked communications to directly and indirectly create better versions of networked communications.

Almost from their birth in 1971, microprocessors have lived in the realm of inverted pricing. Now, telecommunications is about to experience the same kind of plunges that microprocessor chips take-halving in price, or doubling in power, every 18 monthsbut even more drastically. The chip's pricing flip was called Moore's Law. The net's flip is called Gilder's Law, for George Gilder, a radical technotheorist who forecasts that for the foreseeable future (the next 25 years), the total bandwidth of com-

munication systems will triple evel)' 12 months.

The conjunction of escalating communication power with shrinking size of jelly bean nodes at collapsing prices leads Gilder to speak of bandwidth becoming free. What he means is that the price per bit transmitted slides down an asymptotic curve toward the free. An asymptotic curve is like Zero's tortoise: with each step forward, the tortoise gets closer to the limit but never actually reaches it. An asymptotic price curve falls toward the free without ever touching it, but its trajectory closely paralleling the free is what becomes important.

In the Network Economy, bandwidth is not the only thing headed this way. Mipsper-dollar calculations head toward the free. Transaction costs dive toward the free. Information itselfheadlines and stock quotes-plunges toward the free. Indeed, all items that can be copied, both tangible and intangible, adhere to the law of inverted pricing and become cheaper as they improve.

While it is true that automobiles will never be free, the cost per mile will dip toward the free. It is the function per dollar that continues to drop.

For consumers, this is heaven. For those hoping to make a buck, this will be a cruel world. Prices will eventually settle down near the free (gulp!), but quality is completely open-ended at the top. For instance, all-you-can-use telephone service someday will be essentially free, but its quality can only continue to ascend, just to keep competitive.

So how will the telcos-and others-make enough money for profit, R&D and system maintenance? By expanding what we consider a telephone to be. Over time, any invented product is on a one-way trip over the cliff of inverted pricing and down the curve toward the free. As the Network Economy catches up to all manufactured items, they will all slide down this chute more rapidly than ever. Our job, then, is to create new things to send down the slide-in short, to invent items faster than they are commoditized.

This is easier to do in a network-based economy because the criss-crossing of ideas, the hyperlinking of relationships, the agility of alliances, and the nimble quickn'ess of creating new nodes all support the constant generation of new goods and services where none were before.

And, by the way, the appetite for more things is insatiable.

Each new invention placed in the economy creates the opportunity and desire for two more. While plain old telephone service is headed toward the free, I now have three phone lines just for my machines and will someday have a data "line" for every object in my house. More important, managing these lines, the data they transmit, the messages to me, the storage thereof, the need for mobility, all enlarge what I think of as a phone and what I will pay a premium for.

In the Network Economy, you can count on the best getting cheaper; as it does, it opens a space around it for something new that is dear. Anticipate the cheap.

7 The Law of Generosity Follow the free If services become more valuable the more plentiful they are (Law #2), and if they cost less the better and the more valuable they become (Law #6), then the extension of this logic says that the most valuable things of all should be those that are given away. ."

Microsoft gives away its Web browser, Internet Explorer.

Qualcomm, which produces Eudora, the standard E-mail program, is given away as freeware in order to sell upgraded versions. Some one million copies of McAfee's antivirus software are distributed free each month. And, of cours~~.sun p1i.ssedJava out gratis, sendirYg its stuck up and launching a mini路-industry of Java app developers.

Can you imagine a young executive in the 1940s telling the board that his latest idea is to give away the first 40 million copies of his only product? (It's what Netscape did 50 years later.) He would not have lasted a New York minute.

But now, giving away the store for free is an applauded, levelheaded strategy that banks on the network's new rules. Because compounding network knowledge inverts prices, the marginal cost of an additional copy (intangible or tangible) is near zero.

Because value appreciates in proportion to abundance, a flood of copies increases the value of all the copies. Because the more value the copies accrue, the more desirable they become, the spread of the product becomes self-fulfilling. Once the product's worth and indispensability is established, the company sells auxiliary services or upgrades, enabling it to continue its generosity and maintaining this marvelous circle.

One could argue that this frightening dynamic works only with software, since the marginal cost of an additional copy is already near zero. That would misread the universality of the inverted price. Made-with-atoms hardware is also following this force when networked. Cellular phones are given away to sell their services. We can expect to see direct-TV dishes-or any object with which the advantages of being plugged in exceed the diminishing cost of replicating the object-given away for the same reasons.

The natural question is how companies are to survive in a world of generosity. Three points will help.

First, think of "free" as a design goal for pricing. There is a drive toward the free-the asymptotic free-that, even if not reached, makes the system behave as if it does. A very small flat rate may have the same effects as flat-out free.

Second, while one product is free, this usually positions other services to be valuable. Thus, Sun gives Java away to help sell servers and Netscape hands out consumer browsers to help sell commercial server software.

Third, and most important, following the free is a way to rehearse a service's or a good's eventual fall to free. You structure your business as if the thing that you are creating is free in anticipation of where its price is going. Thus, while Sega gape consoles are not free to consumers, they are sold at a loss leader to accelerate their eventual destiny as something that will be given away in a Network Economy.

Another way to view this effect is in terms of attention.

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention. Each human has an absolute limit of only 24 hours per day to provide attention to the millions of inno~ations and opportunities thrown up by the economy. Giving stuff away gamers human attention, or mind share, which then leads to market share.

Following the free also works in the other direction. If one way to increase product value is to make products free, then many things now without cost hide great value. We can anticipate wealth by following the free.

In the Web's early days, the first indexes to this uncharted territory were written by students and given away. The inde.xes .. helped humans focus their attention on a few sites out of thousands and helped draw attention to the sites, so web masters aided the indexers' efforts. By being available free, indexes became ubiquitous. Their ubiquity quickly led to explosive stock values for the indexers and enabled other Web services to flourish.

So what is free now that may later lead to extreme value?

Where today is generosity preceding wealth? A short list of online candidates would be digesters, guides, cataloguers, FAQs, remote live cameras, Web splashes and numerous bots. Free for now, each of these will someday have profitable companies built around them. These marginal functions now are not fringe; remember, for instance, that in the industrial age Reader's Digest is the world's most widely read magazine, that TV Guide is more profitable than the three major networks it guides viewers to, and that the Encyclopaedia Britannica began as a compendium of articles by amateurs-not too dissimilar from FAQs. But the migration from ad hoc use to commercialization cannot be rushed. One of the law of generosity's corollaries is that value in the Network Economy requires a protocommercial stage. Again, wealth feeds off ubiquity, and ubiquity usually mandates some level of sharing. The early Internet and the early Web sported amazingly robust gift economies; goods and services were swapped, shared generously or donated outrightactually, this was the sole way to acquire things online. Idealistic as this attitude was, it was the only sane way to launch a commercial economy in the emerging space.

The flaw that science fiction ace William Gibson found in the Web-its capacity to waste tremendous amounts of time-was in fact, as Gibson further noted, its saving grace. In a Network Economy, innovations must first be seeded into the inefficiencies

Long out of the space program and now a veteran on the political trail, 77-year-old U.S. Senator John Glenn is back in astronaut training and slated for liftoff from the launchpad again-this time to promote research on aging.

"One of the neat things about being a commander," says Lt. Co!. Curtis L. Brown, Jr., "is when you take rookies into space and you see their face after the main engine shutdown and you're in orbit. You never forget that." In October, if all goes as planned, Colonel Brown will fly his fifth shuttle mission with one crew member who may have that same look, not from the novelty of the

Opposite page: Composite shows two views of astronaut John Glenn: in his Mercury space suit in 1962 and a recent informal portrait.

Both are superimposed over a picture of the Indian Ocean taken by Glenn when he was the first American to orbit the Earth.

Above: U.S. Senator Glenn, an astronaut in training, simulates a parachute drop into water during emergency bailout training.

experience but from distant memory.

If Charles Lindbergh had climbed into a cockpit two years before Ronald Reagan became President, he would have been 77, the age John Glenn will be when he makes his second spaceflight. Indeed, to understand the peculiarity of this flight, it helps to do one more piece of math: we are now further away in time from Glenn's first mission than that mission was from Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic.

On February 20, 1962, John Glenn flew over a country with 80 million fewer people than it has today, a land without ZIP codes and throughout which three-quarters of the households still contained both husbands and wives. Most of the wives were home that day, and about the time Friendship 7 was rounding out its third orbit some of the husbands were rounding into a third martini at lunch. The record store down the street from the possibly segregated hotel had yet to stock a Beatles album.

Had the astronaut possessed a more powerful periscope than he did, he still could not have picked out a St. Louis arch or a World Trade Center to serve as a guidepost below.

Not even Telstar, the early communications satellite, was in the heavens to block his path. The capsule's progress through the skies was relayed by teletype from one tracking station to another. "In fact," says Gene Kranz, the legendary controller who was di-

Top: Four members of the STS-95 Mission are briefed on the flight deck of crew compartment trainer in preparation for the late October launch of Space Shuttle Discovery on a nine-day mission. From left are Pedro Duque, mission specialist representing the European Space Agency (ESA); Chiaki Mukai, payload specialistfrom Japan's National Space Development Agency (NASDA); Crew trainer Donald Carico, andfrom the U.s., John Glenn, payload specialist; and mission specialist Scott F Parazynski.

Above: President Bill Clinton during a visit to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

recting the flight that morning, "probably the most advanced technology we worked with was the Atlantic cable, which had just been relaid in 1956."

After five hours, Friendship 7, not much bigger than the Strato!oungers poised before millions of black-and-white TV sets below, retro-rocketed back to Earth. And as it roared through the atmosphere like "a real fireball," in the pilot's own calm words, no one knew for certain that its heat shield wasn't about to fall off.

A young but edgy country, with no idea of the decade it was about to live through, leapt from its chairs and crowed over the man who finally splashed down in the Atlantic. For the next several weeks it heaped gratitude and relief and sheer unjaded delight on the honest-to-God heroand regular fellow-who had made this wild, necessary ride.

When it came time for his ticker-tape parade, there was actual ticker tape to fling through the windows.

A middle-aged visitor to John Glenn's Senate office-one who remembers February 20, 1962, as a lO-year-old, and whose elementary-school autograph book still bears the entry "My hero is John Glenn" on a prefatory page-finds it difficult even to ask the question, Is this shuttle flight perhaps a reward for the Senator's unexpectedly partisan behavior during last year's campaign-finance hearings? After all, Bill Clinton is not without a say in NASA affairs, and more than one observer saw Glenn acting as "White House defense counsel" against the probings of Senator Fred Thompson and the Republican majority.

"It's not true," Glenn says. "I had not one single conversation with the President or the Vice President or any of the people from the Whjte House." The idea of sending an older person into space has so much scientific validity that "even if! wasn't involved, I would be backing that," he insists, adding that he would urge that they "send somebody else."

For all its public-relations value to NASA-this is the biggest manned-space story in years-Glenn sticks resolutely to medical-research terms in discussing his mission's origin and meaning. His wife,

Original seven astronauts: back row from left, Alan B. Shepard, Walter M. Schirm, John H. Glenn; front row, Virgil!. Grissom, M. Scott Carpenter; L. Gordon Cooper and Donald K. Slayton.

I

Annie, says that "he's always wanted to go" back into space. But after a threedecade political hiatus, what requalified him was, oddly enough, getting old.

Glenn, who has long served on the Senate's Special Committee on Aging, was in his late sixties when he sat down one weekend with a Merck manual on geriatrics and another book called Space Physiology and Medicine, one of whose authors, Dr. Arnauld E. Nicogossian, is now the associate administrator of NASA's Division of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications.

Looking through the manual, Glenn was struck by how many of the natural processes of aging "right here on Earth occur to the younger people in their thirties, forties and early fifties up there in space."

The list included cardiovascular changes, immune-system alterations and loss of bone density and muscle mass. Geriatric research, he realized, was his ticket back into space. The next step was to convince NASA to reserve him a seat.

As it happens, by the late 1980s NASA researchers and representatives of the National Institute of Aging (NIA) were also discussing what they started calling "parallel processes." Glenn made known his own interest, and kept pushing the is-

sue in dozens of discussions with gerontologists and NASA administrators.

Finally-after what some say was considerable lobbying on his part-came this January's announcement of his place on shuttle mission STS (Space Transportation System)-95.

For 10 weightless days, Glenn will subject himself to a marathon of geriatric experimentation.

He will take pi lls to measure his protein production, receive injections to calibrate the atrophy of muscle and even swallow miniature thermometers to help measure temperature fluctuations during sleep.

He gives every sign of approaching these tests with the same studiousness he exhibited toward all the esoteric physical humiliations (the feet-in-ice-water test, for example) that accompanied the first astronaut selections at the Wright Air Development Center in Ohio 40 years ago. His quick, soft speech betrays no diminished alertness. It is only when you walk behind him, or fix your gaze on his right eye, slightly more hooded than the left, that you can credit the idea that this man is closer to 80 than 70.

It's a good thing he is, too, or he might not have got his new assignment. Story Musgrave, who retired from the astronaut

corps in 1997 at the age of 62 after six shuttle flights, objected to the idea of Glenn's going even before it was official: "I stayed with the space program and made it my career. He left 33 years ago and went into politics."

But from the gerontological point of view, Musgrave simply isn't old enough for this mission. "When we talked out at NIA about this," Glenn says, "they felt that the most productive assessment will be done on somebody between 75 and 80.

And I didn't suggest that-they suggested that. l' 01 the oldest used astronaut, I guess."

At the other end of the age spectrum, skeptical and even angry postings started appearing right after the January announcement on a Web site used by astronaut hopefuls: "That's completely uncool to let him jump in line like that for STS95. Just because you can fly a little 01' Mercury capsule around the Earth three times, doesn't mean you should be bumped into a prime lO-day mission.

Sheesh." Jokes began immediately (Jay Leno said there would be no space walk on STS-95 because NASA feared Glenn might "wander off"), and there were some dismaying editorials. The flight assignment was "Nostalgia in Orbit" to The New York Times, and "the orbital equivalent of the Lincoln Bedroom" to an op-ed writer in USA Today.

Some biologists expressed doubt about the usefulness of whatever data Glenn would generate, and even a few of the thumbs-ups he got were for the idea's inspirational, not scientific, value. John E. Pike, the director of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists, says it's fine with him if Glenn goes to space.

He only wishes that "they would not confuse the issue with all this foolishness about medical research." He sees the science as a fig leaf for Glenn. "He's such a modest fellow that he won't claim what is rightly his as an American hero, but requires this additional excuse for doing it, which only magnifies his greatness."

The science involved is peer-reviewed and perfectly respectable, but it isn't going to produce immediate breakthroughs in our understanding of the aging process.

At most, Glenn is establishing a starting point for further geriatric research. He has admitted that "one person does not a database make." But as John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, cheerfully adds, "One person a database starts." And maybe, Glenn says, this "opens up" things for some of the other veterans.

When asked about Glenn's impending return to space, his close Project Mercury friend Scott Carpenter, a lean and very fit 73, smiles and says: "I told him I'm going to be his backup again. And this time he's going to come down with something."

If Glenn is the only septuagenarian to go up, even his single shot is likely to provide a psychological lift for senior citizens. "I think it's great," says Bob Dole, Glenn's longtime Senate colleague and himself a recent medical test-subject, for the anti-impotence drug Viagra. "I think it probably gets people out of their chairs" and "shows you never get too old to do these trungs."

In Glenn's case, the flight returns him not so much to his prime as to his earliest ambition. "If World War II hadn't come along," Annie Glenn says, "he was either going to be a medical doctor or go into medical research." Here at last, in fate's roundabout way, comes his chance.

The Johnson Space Center these days has the tranquil look of a state university.

Birdsong floats over its clipped lawns and boxy midcentury buildings; some 1960s rockets, including a Saturn, sit off in a grassy corner like old football trophies too big for a display case. When most of the Original Seven (Glenn was the oldest) were flying their missions, the center was still under construction for space personnel being transferred from Langley Research Center in Virginia.

The new seven among whom John Glenn spends time these days are "about half-again smarter than we ever thought of being back then," he says. "They're better educated, and they're deeper into science."

They're certainly a more diverse lot than the brush-cut, all-Protestant test pilots introduced to the country in 1959. Along with Pedro Duque, a European Space Agency astronaut from Spain, the STS-95

crew includes Chiaki Mukai, a medical doctor who four years ago became the first Japanese woman to go into space.

If back in 1959, at their first news conference, John Glenn did all he could to stand out from the six other astronauts-famously raising two hands when a reporter asked which of the men thought they would safely return to Earth--40 years later he is doing his best to blend in. Except for an occasional lapse, he's "John," not "Senator Glenn," to the rest of the crew. On a Friday afternoon in April, wearing the same blue knit shirt as everyone else, he sits down at a conference-room table and, when a visitor starts asking questions, easily defers to Colonel Brown.

Two of Glenn's crewmates are doctors, and one of these is a specialist in emergency medicine. But that's not, they all insist, from any anxiety about an older-than-usual astronaut's being on board. Glenn himself points out that Mukai was assigned to STS-95 more than a year ago, and Scott Parazynski, the other doctor, notes that two doctors is "actually par for the course" for this kind of "lifesciences emphasis" flight.

The work on STS-95 seems so heavily scheduled that it's hard for a layman to tell just where the mission's emphasis lies. On Day 4 the crew will release a Spartan satellite that will study the Sun's corona unti I it is retrieved on Day 6. There is also major work to be done validating components for a planned maintenance mission to the Hubble Space Telescope and work to be done on the International Extreme Ultraviolet Hitchhiker-3, which will look at stellar objects emitting extreme UV radiation. Two-thirds of the 75 experimental payloads aboard Discovery require some sort of crew attention in space.

Colonel Brown insists that STS-95 is not overloaded, but he admits that the mission had a pretty full plate even before Glenn was added to it. Everyone in the crew gets involved as a medical subjectthat gives us a good base line," Glenn says-which means doing a tremendous amount of blood and urine collection between everything else on the flight. It adds up to "a big organizational problem" for the commander.

Glenn himself will give blood so often that he may have to be catheterized so that he needn't be stuck for each sample. While he calls Parazynski, who will do most of the collecting, his "vampire," it is hard to believe that he's not reminded of his old Project Mercury self more by this freshfaced 36-year-old doctor than by anyone else on the mission. The astronaut corps is a large pack to break out of these days, but Parazynski's forthright talk about hoping to go to Mars someday and of wanting to give "110 percent" to the folks on the ground recalls a younger Glenn delighting assemblyline workers on visits to contractors.

Christopher Kraft, the retired but still no-nonsense flight director of Project Mercury, who counts Glenn a close friend, says that with all his obligations, Glenn's problem now is time: "He doesn't want to make a fool of himself. He's got to spend enough time on it to know what the emergency procedures are. He might have to get out of the damned thing. Might have to slide down that damned wire, right?"

Nevertheless, even if Discovery goes through a fraction of the hair-raising, abortnecessitating catastrophes that controllers keep simulating for Colonel Brown and his cockpit crew, Glenn won't be part of the emergency improvisations.

In fact, he won't be on the flight deck at all. He'll be below, on Discovery's middeck.

In the early days of the space program, the astronauts insisted that they be pilots, be more than the not passengers-to chimps who preceded them aloft. Glenn knows that regardless of the other tasks he has been assigned (he's in charge of the photo equipment and works with some experiments that don't involve his own biology), he is on STS-95 essentially to accept punishment to his aging body-to be, in short, the monkey.

As ironies go, this one is more noble than cheap. Glenn jokes that his bald head is perfectly designed for the electrodes that it is already being fitted with, and he knows that 10 days of weightlessness, some of it free-floating, may induce not only a loss of muscle and bone but also nausea-certainly more of it than he ever had the chance to experience during five

What Final Frontier?

Ourdecades ago seven men were inducted into a profession that previously existed only in science fiction. They were called astronauts, or "star sailors," a name inspired by the Greek legend of the Argonauts-men who sailed into uncharted waters seeking a mythic prize. Early astronaut candidates had to be short in stature-less than 5'11" -to fit the size of the small Mercury space capsule then on the drawing board. Other requirements: they had to be under 40 years old, in top physical condition and experienced aircraft pilots. There were hundreds who qualified. The seven who made it through the selection process were Navy Lieutenant M. Scott Carpenter; Air Force Captains L. Gordon "Gordo" Cooper, Jr., Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom and Donald K. "Deke" Slayton; Marine Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn, Jr.; and Navy Lieutenant Commanders Walter M. Schirra, Jr., and Alan B. Shepard, Jr. When the seven posed for a group portrait in 1959, they were looking out at the unknown. They knew the rockets that would be used to launch manned space vehicles had a tendency to catch fire. They knew if they made it safely into space, chances were good that they would be incinerated upon re-entry if a heat shield malfunctioned. What effects the experience would have on them later, if they managed to survive, were incalculable.

But they did it anyway. As they smiled into the camera, they smiled at death. All of them went up on manned missions.

One of them, Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, died in the line of duty when, in 1967, the Apollo I module caught fire on the launchpad during a pre-flight test. Two other astronauts from a later batch, Edward White and Roger Chaffee, died with him.

Alan Shepard was the first American astronaut in space in 1961. He took a cramped, 15-minute ride in a space vehi-

F

Friendship 7 capsule, in which John Glenn took his first orbital ride, being lifted from the ocean after the successful completion of the mission in 1962.

cle only 2 meters long and 1.9 meters in diameter, 23 days after Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.

The astronauts named their space capsules, and Shepard's was the Freedom 7; the number 7 was a nod to this original team of seven. John Glenn, who followed Alan Shepard and became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, named his Friendship 7. Shepard was later to spend 33 hours on the moon, the only one of the seven to moon walk.

Four of the original daring team survive: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn and Wally Schirra. Alan Shepard died at the age of 74 in July.

Even in old age the astronauts do the job they set out to do in 1959. They continue to promote space research and their personal medical and psychologi-

Original seven astronauts in their Mercury space suits.

Front row, left to right, Schirra, Slayton, Glenn and Carpenter; back row, left to right, Shepard, Grissom and Cooper.

cal histories are data banks for the effects of space travel on human beings.

Now John Glenn, who became a U.S. Senator after a distinguished military career, will make a twilight tour in space in the interest of gerontological research. The effects of sojourns in space in some ways mimic those of old age. Glenn wants to help find out why.

The original seven astronauts have been followed by waves of others, men as well as women, Americans and non-Americans, all of whom continue to chart the environs of space.

Project Mercury was followed by Project Gemini, designed to explore the conditions of space travel and teach astronauts how to maneuver vehicles in space prior to Project Apollo that brought man to the moon. Apollo 11 took Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin to the Sea of Tranquillity lunar base in July 1969.

From there they sent the unforgettable message, "The eagle has landed." The

visit of the first men on the moon lasted nearly 22 hours, and they were in lunar orbit for several days.

Astronauts now spent 10 days and more on a mission.

The Space Shuttle flight missions began in the early 1980s and now run into scores. These are exploratory ventures to enable long-term space travel, the by-products of which benefit inhabitants of Earth. Technology has produced materials for the space program which are now in daily use in our homes, from kitchenware to software to sports clothing. Medical research goes on in every Space Shuttle mission, not only to discover how outer space affects.living things, but to find applications and solve mysteries in terrestrial medicine. Many state-ofthe-art diagnostic. techniques originated in NASA research.

Space probes prepare the ground for farflung manned missions in our solar system. A new step will be

taken later this year when construction begins on an International Space Station.

Despite the loss of seven astronauts when the Challenger burned up 73 seconds after liftoff in 1986 and the earlier Apollo tragedy, experts say there have been far fewer casualties than might be expected since the space program began, considering the obvious dangers.

So the program advances. Space professionals and civilians are eager to participate. NASA gets thousands of applications from which 100 astronaut candidates are chosen every two years.

Farsighted private sector entrepreneurs already have prepared market strategies to ferry civilians aloft. As private companies develop space trade in years to come-something NASA officials acknowledge as an inevitable and welcome component of the space program-more and more of us can boldly go. See you in the Jazz Bar on Pleiades 3.

-L.T.

hours strapped into the seat of Friendship 7. "I hope he takes the pills," Kraft says.

(Both Kraft and Gene Kranz are emphatic in saying that they couldn't do the jobs they did 30 years ago.) The serious risk to Glenn's health may not be very great, but the exhaustion is likely to be considerable, and no one at NASA wants the most memorable photo of STS-95 to be one of Glenn being carried off the orbiter on a stretcher.

The toll this flight may take on Glenn's status as cultural legend is probably even less predictable. His return to space could play out like a lackluster movie sequel, diminishing memories of the long-ago flight that made him such an icon, and NASA's publ ic relations coup could backfire if Glenn's return only adds to the nostalgia that dominates public consciousness of the space program.

But the hotels around Cape Canaveral are already booked solid for October 29, and Colonel Brown, who says his mother usually greets his mission assignments with quiet resignation, got a very different reaction when he telephoned in February to tell her about this one: "Is that the flight with Senator Glenn on it?"

"Well, yeah."

"Oh, great!"

Whatever reminiscence it provokes, Glenn's flight will also begin one entirely forward-looking enterprise: the movement of civilians into space. This is an idea you hardly expect to appeal to Kranz and Kraft, both opinionated retirees writing books about the glory days, each associated with the pure mechanics of flying a precise, "operational" mission. But when you bring it up, the years seem to fall away from them, and they look at you as if now, finally, you're talking.

"To me, the United States has been at the Mississippi River for the last 30 years," Kranz says. "Why just send explorers across? They're not sending the merchants and the plumbers and the poets and the doctors and all those guys." Kraft, who insists that the shuttle was designed to send "normal human beings into space," would throw a philosopher on board as well.

Oddly enough, it will be Glenn, a plumber's son who became so mythic that John F. Kennedy was disinclined to risk

putting him on another flight, who may get NASA past the most lingering trauma of Challenger, the death of Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher. The agency picked the moment of its announcement about Glenn to declare that Barbara Morgan, the teacher who trained as McAuliffe's backup a dozen years ago, has been accepted into the next group of regular astronaut trainees.

At the mention of this "civilian" business, Glenn fairly rolls his eyes. "I don't know what they think 1 am," he says. "I spent a career in the military. 1 was in the space program. They're not gettin' a new boy." His civilian status may be only a technicality, and as John Logsdon says, "in a sense, we've ducked the issue," since Glenn is a sort of "supercitizen" and Morgan will be made into an actual astronaut. But this bit of finesse may still be Glenn's most immediate contribution to the current space program.

In the very long run, even the biological data from his mission may have more to do with the young than with the old.

NASA used to talk about bone and muscle deterioration not as correspondences between spaceflight and the aging process, but as conditions to be overcome during travel to Mars and beyond.

When reminded of this, Glenn emerges from his careful talk of spinoffs and practical applications and cost-benefit ratios to climb aboard the old romantic rocket of exploration- for-its-own-sake: "Absolutely!

1 should have made that clear. The potential is learning things that may benefit people in space, now, younger people, as well as benefit the elderly right here on Earth. It's not all one-way. What if we do learn something about what turns the osteoporosis system on and off? That has value in preventing 'jelly bones' in space on a long-term space mission." Which could make his work on STS-95 less about the health of seaside condo dwellers than about those who may yet venture onto what the official history of Project Mercury called "this new ocean."

Ask the crew members of STS-95 what their biggest anxiety is and you get a variety of answers. Pedro Duque, who will be riding his first rocket, reaches home to

Spain for an analogy: "a bullfighter who isn't scared of the bulls hasn't understood anything." The meticulous Chiaki Mukai is mostly concerned with her dual role as medical-test operator and subject: work too hard at being the former and she'll be too fatigued to generate reliable results as the latter. Colonel Brown knows that the addition of his oldest crew member will make this "the most visible"-that is, scrutinized-of his five flights.

And John Glenn? He'll be thinking in the same quiet, right-stuff italics he did on February 20, 1962. "My main concern," he says, "is that Ijust not mess up." As she watches him lift off, his wife, Annie, will be quietly resurrecting the attitude with which she waited out World War II, Korea, test-piloting at Patuxent River and Project Mercury: "John's like a cat with nine lives." If something happens, she will "always live with the idea that John went the way John would like to. That's been my way of life, 1 think."

Discovery, the ship Glenn's new seven will share, is the space program's phoenix.

Nearly three years after the Challenger explosion, it was the orbiter that returned the United States to space. Few remember the crew or experimental payloads of STS-26, but no one who saw the shuttle soar from Pad 39-B on September 29, 1988, and then keep soaring, past the jinxed 73d second of flight, can forget the inexpressible reIief of that morning.

This fall, almost exactly 10 years later, it will be Discovery taking John Glenn back into space. For the minority of Americans old enough to recall February 20, 1962-perhaps especially those oldest citizens whose physical needs are the official justification for Glenn's place on the flight-the science and public relations of STS-95 will drop away with the shuttle's rocket boosters. At launch, emotion will trump all the mission's other meanings, and anyone who has made the last 36 trips around the Sun with Glenn will care about this aging astronaut for the same reason we cared about Everest and the Moon: because he's there.

0 About the Author: Thomas Mallon is afrequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine.

A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN INDIA Fabindia, the business the late John Bissell built, set trends in the textile trade. But it was for different reasons the transplanted American was so highly esteemed by associates. A friend recalls the man and his work.

ith their antennae permanently positioned to lure the passing customer, retailers tend to be the most sensitive denizens of the marketplace. Everything affects them-bad weather, rent laws, shrinking wallets or a depressed economy. But there are some shops that acquire an immunity to these and allied bazaar disorders. One such exception is Fabindia--drop in on any slow-selling summer afternoon and its showrooms are a buzzing hive of activity. John L. Bissell, the man who started Fabindia as a small enterprise 38 years ago and turned it into a household word representing good taste at affordable prices, was an exceptional man himself.

He was a highly individual American who brought New World merchandising to Old World handlooms, and succeeded in striking the precise balance between commercial profit and social commitment. He left the world of Seventh Avenue retail to make India

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his home but carried with him the lingering spirit of American liberalism that staunchly defends the virtues of honesty, selfreliance and respect for the dissenting voice. In this he remained, as his banker friend Peter Jeffreys put it, "the quintessential Connecticut Yankee ... captivated but not deceived by India ....His observant eye and critical tongue were not the least of the innumerable contributions he made to India." Together with his wife Bimla Nanda, John struck a talent for friendship and hospitality that placed the Bissells at the heart of political, social and diplomatic Delhi for 40 years. A more consistently successful, influential and enjoyable Indo-American partnership can scarcely be imagined.

When John Bissell died in March, aged 66, after a long, valiantly-borne illness, John Burns, The New York Times's South Asia cor-

respondent, sent a couple of personal dispatches to his Managing Editor Joe Lelyveld: " ...1 'fent to a memorial gathering for John Bissell this evening, along with Ie tout Delhi.

Ministers, top bureaucrats, academics, artists, industrialists, writers, journalists, philanthropists, ambassadors, friends; all were there, about 300 people gathered under a shamiana in the drizzling rain that El Nino has brought to north India this year."

I.K. Gujral, then Prime Minister, was politely requested not to come lest his security disturb others; but M.S. Gill, the chief election commissioner, was there, reported Bums, "fresh from shepherding 330 million souls into his polling booths ...."

Unknown aspects of John Bissell came to light that evening, as family and friends took turns to remember him; most moving of all was a tribute read out, in an emotion-choked voice by Arun Shourie, the writer and MP, on behalf of Mita Nandy, the moving spirit behind the Spastics Society, herself too ill to attend the memorial. "I met John 19 years ago," she wrote, "when we started the Spastics Society in rented premises without the money to pay the first month's rent...he not only gave us all that we asked for continuously but also, unsolicited, gave us very large donations which helped to pay our salary bills. There was such dignity in John's giving. He was a shy giver, he did not want to be thanked."

Strong impulses, freak occurrences and unshakable convictions shaped the life of this lanky New Englander, with his slight stoop, air of quizzical concentration and donnish wardrobe composed entirely, it seemed, of crumpled kurtas and worn trousers.

Professor Bissell, you were most likely to assume. But suddenly the gruff voice and taciturn manner-for he was hopeless at small talk-would dissolve into loud guffaws at a ribald joke retold with a string of expletives ("John, John!" Bim would remonstrate, and ever the decorous Punjabi matron, color deeply to the roots of her hair).

John Bissell came, though he would be appalled in any way to show it, from a wealthy, well-connected WASP family. His great-grandfather had presided over the fortunes of one of the great Midwestern railroads, and from that came his endless love of train travel. His grandfather was president of the Hartford Fire & Life Insurance Company, in the insurance town of Hartford, Connecticut, who later bought and lived in Mark Twain's famous house. That gave John the confidence to handle money responsibly and the feeling for spacious, comfortable homes. And his father, later an editor at Newsweek magazine, who had traveled to India after World War II, fired his son's imagination about the subcontinent. Young John went to an exclusive prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, later to Yale, and spent two years in the U.S. Navy in Korea. But he did not care much for any of that.

Till the end, he stuck to his anti-establishment views-antiVietnam, anti-CIA and anti-World Bank. This frequently put him in a difficult spot. John's uncle, Richard M. Bissell, Jr., had headed the CIA during the Kennedy years and, later, his wife Bim worked as an administrator in the World Bank in Delhi for 21 years. Steven R. Weisman of the New York Times once asked John

THE

FABINDIA

STORY E

conomists, social historians and market researchers engaged in defining the Great Indian Middle Class are apt to lose themselves in a vast territory governed by approximate figures. The swelling numbers of such a class are elusive and its patterns of income and consumption much too variable: defining the nature of the beast, moreover, in terms of style and taste can be a waste of time. But if indicators must be found-and labels sought-then Fabindia would feature high on the list of trend-setting establishments that It was as if, says his have shaped the way a promidaughter Monsoon nent swathe of the urban Indian Bissell, "we were all middle class dresses and furbeing invited to nishes its homes. participate in some There cannot be many professionals in Indian cities who great unfolding have not, at one time or another adventure story." in the last 25 years, possessed either a Fabindia shirt, kurta, bedcover, dhurrie or napkin. More than any arriviste fashion dictator, social marketing whiz kid or aggressive foreign retail chain, Fabindia has defined the look of the Indian middle class. It has succeeded in doing so by adhering steadfastly, in four decades of planned growth, to principles of quality, fair pricing and customer satisfaction. But, above all, in its overriding commitment to provide work to thousands of village weavers and artisans, in more than a dozen states, who produce hand-woven and handprinted fabrics, often solely for Fabindia.

A couple of unusual aspects of the Fabindia success story distinguish it from other Indian export-cum-retail enterprises.

Although it began in 1960 exclusively as an exporter of fabrics, Fabindia never went into direct manufacture. Without the draining costs of infrastructure and the encumbrance of labor unions, prices stayed low and profit margins were tight. Unlike many export houses in the formative decades of the 1970s and 1980s who burnt their fingers in retail markets, or grew so fast in exports that they grew out of touch, Fabindia's retail business steadily overtook its exports. "In the late 1960s, if we managed to sell fabric worth Rs. 3,000 locally we considered it a boom month," recalls Meena Chowdhury, who joined John Bissell as a part-time dogsbody on a salary of Rs. 150 a month in 1962 and is now a senior shareholding director in the company.

Today, Fabindia's total turnover is Rs. 250 million and its retail outlets continue to grow apace.

Apart from the "parent body"-a nucleus of four famous shops in Greater Kailash market in south Delhi-and a three-storey outlet in the suburb of Vasant Kunj, Fabindia now has shops in Bangalore and Chennai. A 250-square-meter twin outlet opened in Pali Hill in Mumbai in September, taking Fabindia's retail floor space to a total of nearly 2,230 square meters nationally. That was not the future John Bissell could have imagined when he started his one-man export company in two small rooms adjoining his bedroom in his Golf Links flat. He called it Fabindia Inc. and incorporated the modest venture in his hometown of Canton, Connecticut, thousands of miles away.

Two women provided the initial impetus that eased Fabindia's birth and changed the direction of John Bissell's life. Not long after he came to India his grandmother died in Connecticut, leaving him a legacy of $20,000, that he used as start-up capital. And the day after he landed in Delhi he met Bim Nanda, whom he fell in love with and eventually persuaded to marry him, and who, in turn, persuaded him to stay on.

Two remarkable business partnerships, one Indian, the other British, also devel-

oped in the restless 1960s, as the sandyhaired American plowed through the dusty small towns and villages of north India, knocking on doors, showing swatches to weavers and coaxing entrepreneurs to produce the flat weaves, pale colors and precise weights in handloom yardage and cotton carpets that he wanted. After many trial-and-error starts in Panipat-not then the boom town it is now-he forged a link with the Khera family, a connection that flourishes to this day. In 1964 he also met Terence Conran, progenitor of the Habitat chain that ushered in a furnishings revolution in Europe, who believed that Fabindia's John Bissell embodied the honesty and clarity of purpose to source the right materials out of India.

Like any business venture Fabindia was susceptible to the winds of sweeping political and economic change but it prospered by abiding by the rules. In 1975-76, at the height of Indira Gandhi's Emergency regime, Fabindia was forced out of its second premises in a house on Mathura Road.

Bim Bissell recalls that, later on, John would laugh and say that he owed Sanjay Gandhi thanks for effecting the rule that barred commercial establishments from operating in residential properties because that is what prompted Fabindia to open its first big showroom in Greater Kailash market. "It was my father's belief that retail outlets should move to suburbs rather than the city center to service the needs of the newer and younger householders," says William Bissell, John's 32-year-old son who has been pushing Fabindia's growth in other cities since he joined the business and will soon be introducing a Fabindia line in children's clothing.

In compliance with a Reserve Bank diktat of the early 1970s instructing foreign companies to reduce their foreign equity to 40 percent of the total, John Bissell offered shares in Fabindia to close family members and associates. Madhukar Khera, son of a Punjabi refugee family resettled in Panipat who helped his father run a small, struggling carpet business, had decided early on to manufacture for Fabindia. When John's letter offering the shares came in 1976, Madhukar, by then a key figure in Fabindia's success, bought them for

Rs. 45,000. Today, he reckons, they are worth at least 400 times as much. That letter, thumped out on John's trusty Obvetti portable, set down the company's simple, heartfelt credo: "In addition to making profits, our aims are constant development of new hand-woven products, a fair, equitable and helpful relationship with our producers and the maintenance of quality on which our reputation rests."

Throughout his life John Bissell remained a prolific letter-writer-notes, memos and accounts flowed from his Olivetti with the same regularity as pithilyvoiced observations and opinions, some bitingly funny, others astutely argued, all usually helpful. (After his stroke, he began again from scratch-first painfully holding chalk to slate, then pad and pencil, before graduating to a PC with enlarged lettering.)

Almost anyone connected with the Fabindia story-and there are hundredshas lovingly preserved every scrap received from John, as if, says his daughter Monsoon Bissell, "we were all being invited to participate in some great unfolding adventure story."

It was also his custom to personally type the company's annual report, which he would then dispatch to shareholders, employees, friends and-much to the irritation of Fabindia managers-to the company's competitors. John Bissell espoused transparency in all business affairs just as he held on to Schumacher's smallis-beautiful theory of development economics-he hated the office paraphernalia of peons and secretaries and everyone in Fabindia even now prepare their own invoices and make their own tea.

Working for endless hours on Fabindia's annual financial report, Meena Chowdhury remembers that John would shout across the dividing screen to ask: "How many people do we now employ? One year I said 20, the next year it was 40 and the year after that, I think, I said 82." A dead silence would follow this exchange, so Meena would go over to assure him, and find the same look of exasperation, worry and unanswered questions writ on his face.

"Aw, Jeezus, Meena," John Bissell would say year after year. "How did we grow this big?"

-Sunil Sethi

if having a spy master for an uncle was a problem. John replied that his uncle had once asked him whether he could be of any help but "he was so enraged at even being asked because, he said, it would ruin his life if it were known that his uncle had asked him." Bim says that John firmly avoided U.S. Embassy or World Bank functions during their life together: "He disliked development institutions that he believed were concerned with schemes, not people." Laila Tyabji, chairperson of the crafts society Dastkar, who dealt with him professionally for 26 years, says: "All doors opened to the Bissells, just as their doors were always open to everyone, but I don't ever remember John in a five-star hotel."

John Bissell's work ethic was essentially founded on the belief that successful merchandising must benefit the producer and consumer equally. As a middleman he saw his role as that of catalyst, not as percentage man or empire builder (see "The Fabindia Story"). The first inkling he had that he liked selling was during a coast-to-coast trip during college which he financed by selling Isamu Noguchi lamps. After Korea, he went to work for a fabric importer in New York who had landed the contract to supply costumes for the film Anna and the King of Siam. John found Indian fabrics attractive but wondered why they never got what they ordered.

Soon afterward came his chance to find out why. He was training at Macy's when its president Martin Uzzi received a request from the Indian Government for an American professional who would help design and market Indian textiles for export on a Ford Foundation grant. Uzzi put up his son's name but at the last minute the fellow backed out. John Bissell was asked if he was interested and he said he could leave the John and son William, who is actively in expanding the family business. next day. He landed in Delhi on August 15, 1958; on his first working day at the Cottage Industries Emporium he met the young woman who had been asked to vacate her office for him. She had just returned from America, after taking a degree in education, following the breakdown of her first marriage. L.c. Jain, till recently India's ambassador to South Africa, was her boss and felt sorry about asking her to give up her room. "Don't worry, Bim, he's a Yank. Won't last more than three months."

Remarriage, says Bim Nanda, was not on her mind but John Bissell courted her so assiduously for five years that she finally relented. "He would send me a rose and a note every morning. He waited and waited and wouldn't take no for an answer." By this time, she was working as social secretary to Chester Bowles, the U.S. Ambassador. Richard Celeste, the present U.S. Ambassador,

was Bowles's personal assistant. Celeste remembers "a lanky American lurking in Bim's shadow who danced the jitterbug terrifically."

Celeste attended their wedding in 1963 and the Nanda-Bissells, he says, became "my surrogate family." John himself, typically, summed up the turning point of his life more succinctly: "I'm the guy who struck lucky twice," he would tell friends, "I got the job first-then I got the girl."

But it was India, their Indian family and Indian enthusiasms that held them together. Only once during his years in his adopted country, did he ever express the desire to return to America. "His parents were ill and he wanted to take a sabbatical year in 1984 but we compromised. Instead of two trips a year, he made three," says Bim. Monsoon Bissell, his daughter, says that her father's greatest contribution to her life was that he never made her feel "culturally divided ...his essential Americanness, whatever that is, remained. For 17 years he took Hindi lessons but never mastered the language. The simple reason was that he was too interested in mastelji's everyday life for the lessons to matter."

In the summer of 1993, while driving home in Connecticut, his wife beside him, John suffered a massive stroke. At first he could neither speak, see, swallow nor walk but as soon as he could communicate he wanted to return to India. Very slowly he taught himself to eat and read and write again; he would go to Fabindia each morning in his wheelchair and got a special Trax vehicle made that enabled him to travel. Once he demanded to go to involved Lucknow and, on arrival, taken to several weavers' villages outside the city. At one such village, the weavers wanted to know who he was and what he was doing there. On being introduced as the man from Fabindia, some of the weavers echoed the name. "Fabindia?" they said, "you mean, the kurta people from Delhi?" Meena Chowdhury, his oldest associate at Fabindia, says that it was his favorite story during his last days.

Richard Celeste places John Bissell's life in a wider context when he says that he was a spiritual child of Thoreau's New England who discovered himself in a Gandhian setting. "It's hard for me to imagine that a couple like them will ever exist again," he says.

D About the Author: Sunil Sethi is a well-known syndicated columnist based in Delhi.

ssst! Wanna buy a new computer cheap? If you do, you have plenty of company. One in three buyers now chooses a machine priced at around $1,000 (plus monitor). But unlike cheap computers from the recent past, today's entry-level machines are generally quite good; they take advantage of plummeting prices for memory chips, processors and other components.

Joining the digital age is more affordable these days. Savvy buyers understand that hardly any major applications require the blazing speed and gargantuan data-storage capacity of a $2,500 computer.

For this report, we tested six models from each of two price ranges-$800 to $1,100 economy models and $2,200 to $2,750 powerhouses that have the latest accoutrements. (With all, a monitor is extra.) Most are "family" computers, supplied with a useful complement of software; the Apple is a more spartan "business" machine.

We also tested how well companies handle help lines and service calls for repairs.

P

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Word processing, personal finance, web-surfing, online chat rooms, E-mail, record-keeping, drawing, desktop publishing, children's educational software and most games.

Basic equipment in this price class: 233-MHz Pentium

with RAM,upgradable to 64 MBor more. • 3- to 4-GB hard drive .• 56k fax-modem.

PCI slot (the most versatile kind of expansion slot), one free bay for an additional wavetable MIDI (music instrument digital interface) that provides realistic sound ing and spreadsheet, a banking program, a few games and Internet sign-up kits.

Examples:

The basics above, plus performance-oriented

MMXprocessor or the equivalent. • 32 MBof • 20- to 24x CD-ROMdrive. • At least one unused disk drive. • Sound system, which may lack the reproduction. • Speakers but no microphone. • Installed software, including basic work process-

arcade games, musical entertainment, multimedia web

sites.

Basic equipment in this price class: ·266-

to 300-MHz Pentium II processor (Windows) or Power PC 603e (Mac OS). • 48 to 64 MB of RAM. • A standard ATXmain circuit board, which allows for upgrading .• 6-GB hard drive. • Accelerated (AGP) graphics (Windows), with at least 2 MBof video RAM. • 56k fax-modem, which may have voice capability. • 24x to 32x CD-ROMdrive. • Sound system with wavetable MIDI. • Speakers and, possibly, a microphone. • Three PCI expansion slots, two free bays for additional disk drives .• Installed software including full-fledged word processing and spreadsheet, a banking program, some games and Internet sign-up kits.

Examples:

The basics above, plus cutting-edge arcade games, serious music composing, surfing multimedia web sites, playing DVDsoftware and movies, programming, developing your own multimedia web sites and video.

Basic equipment in this price class: • 333-MHz Pentium

II processor (Windows) or 266-MHz Power PC G3 processor (Mac OS). ·64 MB of SDRAM(a faster type of memory), upgradable to 128 MBor more. • A standard ATXmain circuit board, which allows for upgrading. • 8-GB hard drive. • Accelerated (AGP) graphics (Windows), with at least 4 MBof video RAM. • 56k fax-modem with voice capability .• DVD-ROMdrive with hardware-based video decoder. • Sound system with wavetable MIDI. • Speakers with better sound quality, plus microphone. Two or more PCI expansion slots, at least two free bays for additional disk drives. • Installed software including a suite of full office applications, a banking program, games and Internet sign-up kits.

Ratings

DESKTOP COMPUTERS

& Recommendations

Lack of clutter

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LOW-PRICED WINDOWS COMPUTERS IBM Aptiva E26 Compaq Premio 4540 Hewlett-Packard Pavilion 8240 Acer Aspire 1830 Packard Bell 1616 Packard Bell R515

$800 ($260) 950 (350) 1,100 (400) 1,000 (250) 1,100 (350)

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11

Apple Power Macintosh G3fl66

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The tests behind the Ratings

Past and present This year's high-scoring computers aren't necessarily better than last year's high-scoring computers. We've tried to find a way to present our judgments without making older computers seem inferior and to allow room for future improvements in performance. Here's how: We calculated the overall scores for computers covered in last January's report so they would be comparable with the ones in the Ratings above. The graph at the right shows how they fare with the new scores, which cover performance, convenience and upgradability. For both sets of machines, we used a computer with a 200-MHz processor as a performance benchmark.

With all the computers on the same scale, you can easily compare old and new models.

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P F G VG E

Overall score reflects speed, convenience and upgradability.

Applications speed measures how fast the Windows computers ran a collection of general software. Multimedia speed measures how smoothly Very good and quickly a system can run graphics-intensive programs like Excellent games. Both speed tests compare each Windows computer with a benchmark 2DD-MHz Pentium computer. The Macintosh, rated on a separate scale, was compared with a benchmark lSD-MHz Power PC 6D3e. Multimedia ready indicates how well-configured the system is for games and other multimedia applications.

Expansion, upgrades indicates how well the machine's capabilities can be augmented and how easily its performance can be improved. Manuals reflects the quality and completeness of the hardware-related instructions in print or on disk. System restore indicates the versatility of the software provided for restoring the hard drive's original contents. Lack of clutter measures how much software of dubious utility was included and how easily it could be removed. Energy reflects power consumption and completeness of power-saving features. Display represents the quality of the monitor's image; since you can easily change monitors, this score didn't affect the overall ranking.

Price is approximate selling price, less monitor; the price in parentheses is for a monitor from the manufacturer; an •• denotes the postpaid price for mail-order models.

** ***

Monitor alternatives We tested these computers with a monitor from the computer-makers themselves. Most have a IS-inch display; the Del/and Gateway monitors are 17-inchers These are the monitors to choose if you want to keep the computer-buying transaction simple. But, of course, they aren't the only monitors available. The six listed at the right are third-party IS-inchers you can substitute for the ones in the computer Ratings or to replace an aging 14 -or IS-inch model. The display scores are directly comparable with the scores in the computer Ratings above. With the right adaptor, all will work with a Macintosh. If a IS-inch monitor doesn't suit your needs, consider a 17- or 19-inch model.

****

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Samsung SyncMaster SODS NEC MultiSync ASOO Sony Multiscan CPO-lODES ViewSonic G6S3 Hitachi SuperScanPro SOD Panasonic PanaSync ESO

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nour tests, all the low-priced computers performed everyday tasksword processing, finances and multimedia applications-as ably as the best computers we tested just a year ago.

They should be good enough for all but the most demanding users.

The low-priced machines lack some of the fancy graphics and sound features of the higher-priced group, but they still provide everything you're likely to need.

Here's a rundown:

I

Monitor. You may see a computer ad offering a complete bundle-computer, monitor, even a printer-for one price.

Computers alone are often priced without a monitor, which makes the hardware seem cheaper than it is. So unless you already own a monitor, plan on spending at least an additional $200 to $350 for a IS-inch monitor, $400 to $600 for one with an-inch display.

Software, printer. Low-priced puters come with basic but usable ware that's more than adequate for time users. If the computer is your plan to spend $200 to $300 for a ink-jet printer.

comsoftfirstfirst, color

Processor. You may see ads for very inexpensive computers using a 166megahertz (MHz) or 200-MHz processor.

Such computers run fast enough for many typical applications now, but they may not have the staying power you need for future uses. Currently, mainstream manufacturers use a 233-MHz Pentium with MMX or an equivalent processor in their low-priced machines. These processors should be fast enough to serve you well for several years.

Memory, hard drive. Most of the low-priced computers we tested came with 32 megabytes (MB) of RAM. One Packard Bell had 64 MB. They also have

USB ports. These promising new features are intended to provide true "plug and play" when you add hardware. But when we tried two of the few USB devices currently available, we first had to load software called a driver onto some computers.

Modem. You can expect to get a modem rated for 56 kilobits per second.

Such modems use one of two incompatible standards for their highest speeds.

There's a new industry standard, Y.90, due to be adopted in the fall. Most Internet providers haven't yet upgraded to Y.90. Most computer-makers haven't yet offered upgrades for existing 56k modems; IBM and Micron are exceptions. ... But some cheesiness Some low-priced computers were sloppily assembled. The Packard Bell S616's wavetable sound and advanced power-management features were initially disabled (we got them running), some of its multimedia software was outdated, while a preinstalled driver supported the Microsoft Intellimousewhich wasn't even part of that computer.

The Packard Bell R515 couldn't recognize plug-and-play monitors properly.

And the Acer's USB ports were disabled at first; it took some effort to make them work.

A few low-priced computers also compromised on upgradability.

Some examples: • The Compaq Presario 4540 has room for only a single PCI plug-in expansion card and just one spare drive bay. It also has only one slot for a memory card, making it impossible to add more memory (RAM) without discarding what's already there.

• The low-priced IBM Aptiva and Acer fix the amount of video RAM at 1 MB. That limits the computer's ability to run very colorful graphics at high screen resolutions.

JI .

$2,SOO:

Great ... Performance ...

igher-priced computers like the ones we tested include about $400 worth of useful software, plus a 333-MHz Pentium II or a Mac OS Power PC G3 processor, 64 MB of RAM and a 7-to-8-GB hard drive.

H

The $2,750 Macintosh we tested features a fast new chip and some key internal design changes that make it twice as fast as any other Mac we have tested. If only the Mac came with pre-installed software.

Other major features found only on higher-priced machines include: Better graphics. Expect at least 4 MB of video RAM and advanced graphics with 3-D acceleration, for more-realistic action games or better video for multimedia web sites.

Better sound. The wavetable MIDI, nearly standard, delivers very realistic sound-a plus for game aficionados and serious musicians.

DVD drive. This component can play existing CD-ROMs and the newer DVDROMs: which hold a single movie or several gigabytes of data on a CD-sized disk.

...But a Few Cut Corners Even at the $2,500 level, manufacturers cut back in various ways: User manuals. Now you get one book that covers just the critical information.

For details, you have to consult documentation on the hard drive or a CDwhich may be impossible if the machine isn't working properly. The IBM Aptiva £26 had the best manual of the computers we tested.

Nonupgradable graphics. The Hewlett-Packard 8280 and Compaq 4860 have the accelerated graphics circuitry on the main circuit board, where it can't be upgraded.

LEE WAISLER

Gravitating to India "I choose materials for their innate associative values; sand for time, wood for life, black for mystery, concrete for binding, light-reflective spheres for their mirror quality. These materials wake both creative and destructive reactions. My effort is to place the viewer between these forces so the viewer becomes the fulcrum, the balancing point separating, even harmonizing, -Lee Waisler these opposing forces. The viewer completes the work."

yfirst meeting with Lee Waisler may be described as fortuitous.

Early last year I chanced upon him at a luncheon at Inder Gujral's home in Maharani Bagh before Gujral became Prime Minister. This was Lee's first visit anywhere east of Europe.

Going by our own Indian perceptions, Lee appeared tall and well built, with a broad and open smile.

I liked the man right away. Spread out before him on a low table was what looked like a set of drawings on fine, handmade paper of varied hues, though mostly off-white. My own professional interest made me crane my neck to have a better look at them. Reviewers, who are prone to receive a large body of artwork from day to day, become a trifle blase.

Faced with a large, uneven assortment, one is quite likely to suffer a certain amount of mental indigestion. At the best of times, critics are treated to moments of genuine, happy surprise. With Lee's singular drawings, such a moment had come to me with considerable impact. Any proffered explanations of the works at that moment appeared quite unnecessary, so simple, yet supremely realized were these compositions. Later, certainly, all that information enhanced the value of these works in my eyes all the more. Not to ad-

M

vocate mindlessness, but an instantaneous first appeal of the outer aspects of any visual art is a test of its positive worth, provided of course one is a connoisseur of the arts. In some way critics are hedonistic creatures, much like wine or tea tasters.

And so, at least for me, the taste of Lee's spare, razor-sharp, and often literally razordrawn, images was exquisite. As he unveiled drawing after superb drawing, there was no question of not being enthralled. It is rare to see work so honed to the bone, that is, to the point of telegraphic brevity.

And yet the messages communicated by these works were sharp and clear. There was no mystifying ambiguity to anyone of them. Being not voluble on the score of color nor clogged with superfluous images, these drawings possessed an uncommon finesse. The quality or grain of the paper itself-often the best of the French-was superb, and on it the hair-wire fine sculptural forms resonated appealingly.

Many of these works employed modeling paste, graphite, paper collage, walnut shell on paper, acrylic and light-reflecting materials. Some of them were executed in 1989, others several years later. From among these, Blood Libel is a most powerful work, one which in its very connotations made the hair on one's head bristle.

That was my first glimpse of Lee's

artistic personality. As we struck a deeper friendship in the succeeding weeks, there came still more surprises to light. But it was really observing Lee in his studio at Sanskriti Kendra on his second visit during the fall of last year, that I was privileged to view the painter at work on large, entirely unconventional paintings, and on some terra-cotta sculptures. In all these works, one at once read large meanings, but of that anon.

Thereafter, poring over books concerning the artist, catalogs of his exhibitions and, most importantly, by conversing with him I realized the serious and passionate nature of his inspiration. believe there is at the core of Lee's artistic persona a duo of what may be called even-balanced, finely meshed spiritual impulses. On the one hand, like all conscientious artists he believes that the perfection of form is obligatory: no certainty of any true art without the formal perfection we denote as beauty. Yet, on the other hand, there is an all-powerful ethical will working itself out in him and in his work. It is surely this alone that led to his work of the 1960s, for instance, his enormous inflatable mushroom sculpture symbolizing the Big Bomb and similar works. His work single-mindedly hinted

I

Freud and Jung, 1989 294 x 131 x 6 cms.

Acrylic, aggregate, sand, glass and teak wood on canvas.

Sati,1998 244 x 152 cms.

ACI)'lic, wax, sand, glass, dun.g on canvas.

Double, 1998 168 x 102 cms.

Acrylic, san.d, glass on canvas.

"Had not the Nazis (and others) subordinated the self to the Volk or the masses or the media, and thrust the world into despair?

Driven by a sense of responsibility to sustain the individual, I began to work."

at the destiny of the Earth held in suspenseful balance. The artworks appeared as if brought into being to sensitize the viewer's conscience to something of the utmost importance: the very survival of the Earth. Lee plowed an almost lonely furrow then, and by hindsight we are wiser, thanks to his artistic persistence on issues such as this. Now, as it happens, the cause that was so fervently espoused in the '60s is still very much with us at the tail end of the century.

So, born though Lee Waisler was, far from the theaters of the last great world war, its echoes seemed to have made a fateful impact on his artistic sensibility, the life of his spirit. The artist in him is keenly alert to the fate and fortune of us all, no matter of what origin. The painter's quick responses to world pain, quite like a seismic needle to earth tremors, as much as his determination to guard against the recurrence of any holocaust like that in Europe earlier on, are humbling. These are not narrow political attitudes, rather they are expressions of a faith in life, indicative of strong convictions at the very base of a creative imagination. Lee's art, therefore, opens up the clogged springs of pity in the human heart, though all this is done without the least trace of sentimentality or cliched piety. Lee often quotes the moving poetry of Paul Celan, the German Jewish poet. He based several of his important works on the writer Primo Levi's writings.

This is the spiritual company he keeps.

With writers like Celan or Levi, as with Lee himself, there could never be any divide between the artist's public persona and the man behind. Given the fateful sociocultural history of the 20th century, an artist worth his or her salt is obliged to wage war with the powers of darkness.

The consequent art, then, is geared to spiritual action.

Lee learnt the lessons of abstract expressionism, a la de Kooning, ponock, Rothko and others rather well, only he has put them at the service of drawing the viewer's attention to the cancers that endanger God's lovely world in the modern age. For these very reasons his art acquires a certain metaphysical dimension.

After an, the artist is meditating on the

central issues ')f human life. Lee is a child of a century which has given us marvelous technological appliances and ushered in prosperity. He has in his heart the knowledge of the centuries' hundreds of millions war dead and the great pain suffered by many millions more.

As an American and as an artist by vocation, Lee cannot but imaginatively empathize with victims of pain, past, present or future. Thus the world receives the artist's committed attention and finds a place in his artworks-a large number of them suffused with an intense solemnity.

The thrust of his art is to cauterize evil, an evil which doe~ not inhabit any single house but is endemic. Yes, the artist means to awaken us to our own humanity by constant reminders-in the shape of potent symbols and signs-of an era of nihilism.

Life against Death could well be the title of a large body of his works, wherein an artist of genuine conviction avows the union of humanity.

Of course Lee's art never makes direct statements, never is didactic. Rather its truth and messages come in nutshell, as encoded charged symbols, each tightly woven around the nucleus of a paramount concern. Such use of the language of symbols takes his art further afield. It affects our very beliefs, even when it appears to be merely working upon our optical centers via tasty, harmonized colors and forms. It is remarkable how bald ideas in other hands, here stir us to our roots. The painter, as already suggested, wishes nothing less than to enact those sacral rituals in our imaginations anew, to make us penitent, chaste of heart. Art reaffirms a commitment to life. hy did Lee decide on working in antipodal India and exhibit his works here? It is evident that the more mentally active and restless an artist, the more he or she win scour the face of the Earth in order to extend his or her range of experience. In Lee's view, the India of the creative imagination teems, as nowhere else, with powerful symbols, signs, legends, myths and metaphors-the poetic language of the spirit. Given his own inner bent, this

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world is the exact station for his pilgrim's progress, no matter how his own work is received in it. The India he gravitates to is not the journalist's India or the one of the hurried tourist-but one which speaks by supersubtle indirections through its ancient arts. This world suited Lee's own artistic nature perfectly.

He felt an affinity with its higher cultural traditions.

Lee's India is a deep inwardness of spirit. True artists are observant, their eyes and ears ever open to the world around them. So Lee is avid to renew his received self and arrive at fresh mindblowing horizons. At the same time, being a rational craftsman, he employs all possible new industrial material in order to enhance the power of his work.

Light bounces off the surfaces of his works without being a mere optical trick to beguile jaded eyes. Take his use of black-a very potent color or non-colorsymbolizing the large range of positive and negative values represented in his outstanding compositions. Certainly, very powerful works have been created by this use of black. One extraordinary painting done at the Sanskriti Kendra is the Avatar, which seems to incorporate a visitationperhaps Death itself. Here is a dread presence, but still there is nothing negative about it. Rather, the work has a compelling, hypnotic quality.

Among the works that Lee is putting up in his shows in India are such striking ones as Sati, Calcutta, Study and Double-several of them based on Indian themes.

Other compositions, such as Structure, Interior, Bridge and Two, if noncommittal on one plane and so bare of detail, are however, symbolic in character. Lee has, after all, so cultivated his intellect that it perceives all of the phenomena of nature .as symbolic, thereby revealing the forces and laws governing the energies and spiritual aspects of our universe. In this way he brings an ancient method to modern realities. His certainly is a new art vocabulary.

And this is why India's art and thought and concepts fascinate the painter.

A large number of Lee's earlier works combine the temporal and eternal facets

Gnomon Altar I, /981 150 x 137 x 6 cms.

Aoylic glass, modeling paste, aggregate and maple wood on canvas.

Convergence, 1983 109 x 202 x 3.8 cms.

Acrylic: maple wood, light reflective on canvas.

Study, 1998 Acrylic, modeling paste, glass on canvas.

"I know who my predecessors are.

Forty years ago, throwing paint was an act of liberation. Today we must find boundaries to contain the expansion of energy.

Art is a language in the makingit is a humanizing act."

Rajas Sattva, 1988 241 x 254 x 10.8 ems.

Acrylic, maple wood, light-reflective spheres on canvas.

Tamas

Gnomon Altar, 1981 150 x 137 x 6 ems.

Acrylic, maple wood, light-reflective spheres on canvas.

An exhibition of Lee Waisler's work may be seen at Art Konsult in New Delhi from November 25th to December 20th, after which it travels to Mumbai and Calcutta.

of reality in a powerful mix. These include Time Tunnel (1979), Grave Digger (1982) and Mute Lyre (1988). Great dignity combines in a transparent way with gaiety of spirit. A large number of the works are radiant, lively and absolutely stable-all objects of physical beauty, at moments possessed of a light that only a

clear sky can give. Also, one must remember, these works are not mere decorations. For how can objects that are so independent, so sure of themselves and so beautiful to look at be simplistically decorative? Lee Waisler's works appear realized in a natural and unforced way that defies analysis.

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About the Author: Keshav Malik is art critic of the Times of India, New Delhi. He is author of 14 volumes of verse of which the latest, Outer Reaches, was published last year.

Consumer Advocacy A Growing Influence

"The customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption on our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider on our business, he is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so."

-MAHATMA GA DHI

In December 1993, two-year-old Harjot Ahluwalia, the only child of his parents, suffering from typhoid was administered a high dose of the wrong medicine by a nurse at a hospital in New Delhi.

As a consequence, the boy suffered irreparable brain damage. The Ahluwalias took their case to the National Consumer Dispute Redressal Commission, New Delhi. The commission, after examining the medical reports, directed the hospital and the nurse to pay Rs. I million to Harjot as compensation and Rs.250,000 to his parents to buy the necessary equipment for his rehabilitation and maintenance. It also directed the defendants to pay an additional Rs. 500,000 to the Ahluwalias for the "agony caused by the incident. " The welfare of the minor being an important consideration of the commission, it decided that the compensation paid to Harjot be kept as afixed deposit in a nationalized bank for 37 months and quarterly interest paid to his parents to meet the expenses.

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onsumerism in India is beginning to establish an identity of its own.

Almost 30 consumer-oriented laws, the growth of consumer advocacy groups and the impact of the media have all contributed to this change.

"The growth of consumer advocacy in India is a natural outgrowth of the Consumer Protection Act, 1986," says Pushpa Girimaji, well-known consumer activist and coll)mnist who has chronicled the growth of the movement in the country since its origins. "We must understand that in India the consumer movement has developed differently as compared to countries like the United States. Usually in all countries across the globe or in the case of any people's movement like the women's rights movement, first there are organizations; they agitate; and finally, the government comes up with a law to protect them. But in the case of the consumer movement in India, I find that the law itself acted as a catalyst."

To a certain extent, the government's

decision to pursue the policies of liberalization and globalization, and the consequent injection of competitiveness into the manufacturing and services sectors, also created an atmosphere favorable to the growth of the consumer movement in the country. While prior to 1986 and the Consumer Protection Act there were about 50-60 consumer groups in the country, the number rose to over 600 following the enactment of the law.

This distinction apart, there are many other characteristics that the consumer movement in India shares with the developed countries, notably the United States and the United Kingdom. For one, the Consumer Protection Act is modeled on the "small claims court" concept seen in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, besides the various legislations and regulations enacted in the U.S. to ensure consumer protection.

Consumerism, so much a modern buzzword, actually began earlier than one might expect. Some of the earliest at-

tempts to protect consumers began in the Middle Ages. Guilds established by artisans set standards for products sold by their members. Another form of early consumer protection comprised of laws against usury-the lending of money at exorbitant interest rates. These laws regulated the rate of interest that moneylender could charge borrowers. Even then, the marketplace was ruled by the principle of caveat emptor (the Latin phrase meaning "let the buyer beware"). If dissatisfied with the quality or price, they complained directly to the person who made or sold the product.

In the 1700s, widespread distress over the adulteration of food and drink led several European countries to take action against these practices. In the United States, concern with consumer rights and protection came in three waves-at the turn of the century, in the 1930s and in the period since the 1960s spearheaded by the activism of Ralph Nader.

Now regarded as the "founder" of the current consumer movement in the country, Nader authored the now-classic Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile, in 1965 which carefully documented safety defects in American cars. He also helped set up the Center for Study of Responsive Law, a nonprofit, foundation-funded organization, which initiated studies of a variety of consumer problems. Besides his battle against the power of large corporations like General Motors, Nader has made significant contributions in such areas as meat inspection, mental health and old-age care, water and air pollution, nuclear power and technological data gathering. He sees citizenship and community action as the basic modes for insuring democracy in a corporate state. He seeks, in his own words, "to create a new dimension to the legal profession. What we have now is a democracy without citizens. No one is on the public's side ... .! hope a new

generation of lawyers will begin to change that."

Consumer information organizations in the United States, too, enjoy considerable clout. Modern Maturity, the journal of the American Association of Retired Persons, has 22.4 million subscribers. Similarly, Consumer Reports, the magazine published by the over six-decade-old Consumers Union, circulates in nearly 4.7 million American homes. The Consumer Federation of America is a national federation of more than 250 groups with consumer concerns. Here in India, taking a cue from the activism of U.S. consumer advocacy organizations, the Consumer Education and Research Society based in Ahmedabad, among others, brings out Insight, a magazine modeled on the U.S. Consumer Reports which provides "independent, objective information on consumer products in the areas of food, pharmaceuticals and household electrical appliances."

Similarly, the Consumer

Guidance Society of India-one of the earliest such organizations in the country-seeks to gain protection against food and drug adulteration.

While the consumer movement in India, in the sense that we know it today, began only after the enactment of the Consumer Protection Act, it did have a prior existence. The Consumer Guidance Society of India based in Mumbai, for instance, began comparative testing of products way back in 1977. Its consumer journal, Keemat, is now in the 27th year of publication. But these and the efforts of

was won largely by the efforts of consumer and citizens' rights activist, H.D. Shourie, who filed a petition before the Supreme Court. Shourie was also instrumental in ensuring that the consumer courts were set up as per the provisions of the Consumer Protection Act. Girimaji recounts: "When the first consumer protection draft bill was drawn up, the government called a meeting of consumer organizations and activists. It was obvious to us all that the draft was very weak. The government had kept the public sector utilities outside the purview of the

alike as a pathbreaking legislation. It remains so, though many now think that it needs to be updated to accommodate the emerging situation following liberalization.

Nevertheless, the Act incorporates provisions which ensure consumers with effective safeguards against defective goods, deficient services and unfair and restrictive trade practices. And the definition of "services" is so wide that any service barring "personal service" and "free service" comes under the purview of the consumer courts.

There have been some significant moments in the consumer struggle since the

"The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything."

-David Confessions

other motley groups were focused on mainly local issues like rising prices, adulteration of food, and spurious and hazardous drugs (medicines) in the various cities and towns; the vast rural populace was by and large untouched or ignorant of the movement. In that sense the situation has not changed much; the consumer movement is still primarily an urban middle class phenomenon, although there are a few scattered organizations such as the Voluntary Help Association of India who work in rural areas.

One of the earliest campaigns of the fledgling consumer movement was to mandate manufacturers to mention the maximum retail price (MRP) on every single item of a product, a crusade that

proposed consumer courts. Then the amount of compensation they had thought of was four times the cost of the product.

That is how they defined compensation. I remember one consumer group objected saying it was grossly inadequate. It gave the example that if someone was given a medicine tablet costing 20 paisa and the person died, he would be entitled to only 80 paisa as compensation!

"To the credit of the government, however, it quickly agreed to redefine the compensation and also to bring all public utilities under the purview of the Act. So what finally emerged was a very good law."

When the Consumer Protection Act came into being in 1986, it was widely hailed by activists and consumer groups

Ogilvy,

of an Advertising

Man, 1963

enactment of the law. One such area, according to Girimaji, is medical negligence where the advocacy groups have scored a major victory for Indian consumers. Quoting the American example, the Indian Medical Association (IMA) argued that doctors do not come under the purview of the Act since they provide personal service, excluded under the Act. In the United States, IMA contended, because of fear of litigation the doctors there practice defensive medicine. Consequently, medical services are very expensive.

They felt that the move would boomerang on the Indian consumer.

The National Commission disagreed.

Says Girimaji: "The medical lobby is very

Classic Reading: Who Is the Consumer?

Published by consumer watchdog group Consumers' Research 30 years ago, this assessment of the consumer was recently reprinted in their magazine as "still instructive for policies today. " hile there's a lot of talk about "consumer" protection, it isn't at all clear just who the consumer is and what are his--or her--characterlStlCS, in an economic sense.

Apparently there is real confusion in official circles.

Consumers, for example, are sometimes held to be so well off that they do not merit special aid or consideration; they are to be taxed at a higher rate to provide money for more services in the so-called "public sector" of our society. Then there is a concept of poor, old or ailing consumers who must be provided with government protection against gyps, frauds and cheats, high-interest charges, high prices for drugs and medicines, and an unknown number of household safety hazards.

Although a variety of consumer meetings, conferences, and "assemblies" have been held in various sections of the United States, those in attendance appear to have been professionals of one sort or another, government officials, labor union representatives. Rarely, if ever, did one find a single representative ultimate consumer, whose well-being was the topic under discussion by those participating.

As Consumers' Research pointed out in a little consumer-economic pampWet published in 1934, the quality of being a consumer is so simple

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and inescapable that mostly we take it for granted.

Consumers have been functioning as a determining part of our economic system for some time, quietly and unobtrusively.

Consumers are people who purchase goods and services for their own or family use and enjoyment.

Consumers have more to gain from a low price than a high one and from high quality rather than low quality.

In an early statement of one of the major objectives of Consumers' Research, we suggested that many consumers, given an income above subsistence level, would as a practical matter achieve better results by learning how to get more for their money than by continually striving to get more income.

Actually few people-even those who are called affluent-think of themselves as consumers. They are just not "consumer class conscious." It has been the experience of consumer informational organizations in different parts of the world that people with inteWgence, education, ability and drive that enable them to earn good or adequate incomes are interested in practically useful information on how to spend their money to the best advantage. Such people are usually indifferent to participation in campaigns for protective laws, except in extreme cases as prevention of poisoning or accidents, safety regulations and pure food and drug laws. Even in such cases, public opinion usually can be mobilized only after the occurrence of a startling major accident, a number of poisoning cases or an epidemic.

The fact that high prices are often

the result of labor union demands for wages that outstrip gains in productivity could perhaps be overlooked in the appeal of crusading for the lowincome groups. Consumers, however, should hesitate to accept the view that organized labor is fighting the consumer's battle, particularly in the matter of high prices for goods and services.

Some hold that organized labor, instead of pressing for "new consumer protective" legislation, might better serve the consumer by emphasizing the importance of turning out products that are assembled and inspected with greater care before delivery. • Who is the consumer? Who is to represent the interests of the "200 million guinea pigs" whose purchasing habits keep the United States on a high level of economic and industrial activity is a matter for the federal and state authorities to consider carefully, before moving in too fast with new "consumer protective" legislation.

The simplest definition may well be that the consumer is the guy or gal who makes the wheels go round by buying goods and services, the indispensable person whose propensity for purchasing has made American industrial activity the envy of the world.

He-or she--doesn't really need a bureau or a representative in either the national or state capitals once he makes up his mind to assert his power and preferences. When buying activity is reduced to the bare day-to-day necessities, because of prices that are too high and quality that is too low, or servicing that costs too much, industrial and economic activities deteriorate disastrously.

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strong, and at one time it did appear as if they would somehow bend the government to their stand. It was then, I remember, that the Consumer Affairs Ministry received thousands of letters from consumers all over the country urging that medical services be included in the Consumer Protection Act." The issue went to the Supreme Court, which went one step further than the National Commission.

"The National Commission had kept government hospitals outside the purview of the Act. But the Supreme Court even brought most of the government hospitals, unless they were providing free service to everybody, under the Act," says Girimaji. "Now all professionals are covered under the Consumer Protection Act. There have been cases against lawyers as well."

But problems remain. One such problem is the long delay in securing redressal of complaints. Although the law stipulates that all complaints be dealt with within 90 days, thousands of cases are pending before the courts. The problem is accentuated by the delay in setting up more and more consumer courts by the state governments. Also, although the law is simple and complainants do not require lawyers to argue their case, more and more manufacturers have begun hiring lawyers to state their case. 'The lawyers come and seek adjournments like they do in regular courts. The law does not provide for adjournments," says Girimaji, adding, "in fact, it states that if either of the parties fail to appear before the bench, the court can take an ex-parte decision."

Consumer activists also note that with

"What helps people, helps business."

-Leo Burnett, founder and former chairman of Leo Burnett Company

Despite the appearance of numerous advocacy groups in the country, the consumer movement is still not strong enough to take up issues in a consistent way. For a long time there was no coordination among the various consumer organizations. "Often different consumer organizations involved in product testing spend their limited resources only discover that they have been testing the same product," says Girimaji.

Recently, however, the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation took the first step in this direction by deciding to establish a central organization to coordinate activities of all consumer groups and take up issues at the national level. This has resulted in the establishing of the Consumer Coordination Council in New Delhi.

the rapidly changing economic and consumer scenario in the country, in the wake of liberalization and the arrival of multinational companies, there is greater need for consumer vigilance. Consumer activist P.G. Menon feels that the government, while opening the markets to these forces, should also bring in suitable laws to protect the consumers. "I do feel that the Consumer Protection Act is not a solution to all the problems consumers face. But the government seems to think that the law is enough. It is not," he says.

Pushpa Girimaji agrees. "First, we are not quality-conscious as consumers.

Secondly, we don't have laws that will protect consumers on safety aspects.

Thirdly, we don't have manufacturers who

are careful about quality. I have proposed to the Consumer Affairs Ministry to set up a Product Safety Commission as in the United States, which will oversee all this.

We also don't have a system of withdrawal of unsafe products from the market. These things must happen." She gives the example of a multinational car manufacturer that has recently come to India.

"There were complaints about the aftersales service provided by the company.

Now the company would never have gotten away with this in the United States.

There, they have the Lehman Law, which stipulates that if after repeated complaints a manufacturer is unable to repair the product, it must be replaced. Here there is no such law."

For the Indian consumer groups, as with many other voluntary organizations, funding has remained a problem. "Many organizations could be more active only if they had more funds," she says. The government has established the Consumer Welfare Fund for this purpose but only a few groups like VOICE (Voluntary Organization in the Interest of Consumer Education) in Delhi and Manubhai Shah's Consumer Education and Research Centre in Ahmedabad have sufficient resources to set up product-testing facilities and have separate complaint cells and legal cells for consumer protection. The majority of the consumer groups, hamstrung by paucity of funds, are reduced to fighting local issues.

The consumer movement in India is active but if it aims to spread its message, "we-the consumers and the government-need to rethink how we define "natural justice,' " feels Menon. "We inherited our legal system from the West as derived through British law. The question is how can we bring our Indian culture, with these very hierarchical and other divisions which worked under certain conditions, and make it work through the concept of the rights of the individual coming first and his duties coming second, like we see in the American system, and also the duties of the state coming first and the rights second. Even Gandhi said you must first do your duty. The rest will follow. I believe this should be the case with our consumer movement also."

D

InternatiGnal Cooperation Against

II

Combating corruption is such a difficult and sensitive issue that many national political leaders who support such efforts in principle are hesitant to undertake them in practice.

How can international cooperation help build support for fighting corruption, both nationally and globally?

Virtually all forms of corruption are proscribed by virtually all countries. Why, then, don't countries take more steps to reduce corruption? If countries have trouble fighting corruption, it may be because they lack sufficient will or sufficient local capacities, such as proper strategies and structures (including incentives), to prevent corruption. In some instances, local capacities are constrained by costs, in others by a lack of know-how and in still others by insufficient efforts to devise strategies to combat corruption.

International cooperation can help individual countries to develop the necessary will and capacities. This article proposes several new initiatives in which international cooperation could play crucial roles in combating corruption. One is the sponsorship of regional diagnostic studies. Countries would cooperate in organizing and funding, and then share the results of, private sector studies of systematic corruption in several areas (such as procurement, health care and courts). These studies would help identify systematic improvements that might be made and suggest how to ensure the permanence of improvements through monitoring.

Reprinted from Finance and Development. Copyright © 1998 by tbe International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development!

World Bank. All rights reserved.

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In Belgium and the United Kingdom, Japan and Italy, Russia and Spain and other countries, allegations of corruption playa more central role in politics today than at any time in recent memory. Corruption is hardly a problem exclusive to developing countries or countries in transition. It is true that in Venezuela a local dictionary of corruption has been published in two volumes (Diccionario de La corrupci6n en VenezueLa, 1989). But it is also true that a French author put together something similar for his country (Gaetner, 1991). Probably every country could publish a similar work.

The fact that much corruption in developing countries has important industrial country participation is now a commonplace. The nongovernmental organization Transparency International focuses on corruption in "international business transactions" and points out that there are First World givers of many Third World bribes. In coming years, the World Trade Organization is likely to find that this issue is a central one.

The reminder that corruption exists everywhere-in the private as well as the public sector, in rich countries and poor-is salutary, because it helps us avoid unhelpful stereotypes. But to contextualize the discussion is not to end it. In fact, noting that corruption is widespread may convey its own unhelpful subliminal messages. It may suggest, for example, that all forms and instances of corruption are equally harmful. Even more perniciously, it may lead less discerning listeners or readers to the conclusion that because corruption exists in every country, nothing can be done about it where they live. Consider the analogies to pollution or disease. Both phenomena may be observed everywhere, but their extent and patterns of incidence

differ radically among various regions, countries and localities.

Questions of degree and kind are crucial, and this is also true of corruption. No one would conclude, for example, that because water pollution and AIDS exist in every country that nothing can or should be done to reduce them.

Corruption is a term with many meanings. The beginning of wisdom on the issue is to subdivide and analyze its many components. Viewed most broadly, corruption is the misuse of office for unofficial ends. The catalogue of corrupt acts includes-but is not limited to-bribery, extortion, influence peddling, nepotism, fraud, the use of "speed money" (money paid to government officials to speed up their consideration of a business matter falling within their jurisdiction) and embezzlement. Although people tend to think of corruption as a sin of government, it also exists in the private sector. Indeed, the private sector is involved in most government corruption.

[3~~II:c::r~I::I~C::I::II!,I!,,,,!"r!1::I1iI Different varieties of corruption are not equally harmful.

Corruption that undercuts the rules of the game-for example, the justice system, or property rights, or banking and credit-devastates economic and political development.

Corruption that allows polluters to foul rivers or hospitals to extort exorbitant or improper payments from patients can be environmentally and socially corrosive. In comparison, providing some speed money to get quicker access to public services and engaging in mild irregularities in campaign financing are less damaging.

Of course, the extent of corruption also matters. Most systems can stand some corruption, and it is possible that some truly awful systems can be improved by it. But when corruption becomes the norm, its effects are crippling. Such systematic corruption makes establishing and maintaining internationally acceptable rules of the game impossible, and is one of the principal reasons why the least developed parts of our planet stay that way.

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Consider two analytical points. First, corruption may be represented as following a formula: C = M + D - A. Corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus accountability. Whether the activity is public, private or nonprofit, and whether it is carried on in Ouagadougou or Washington, one will tend to find corruption when an organization or person has monopoly power over a good or service, has the discretion to decide who will receive it and how much that person will get, and is not accountable.

Second, corruption is a crime of calculation, not passion.

True, there are both saints who resist all temptations and honest officials who resist most. But when bribes are large, the chances of being caught small, and the penalties if caught meager, many officials will succumb.

Combating corruption, therefore, begins with designing better systems. Monopolies must be reduced or carefully regulated.

Official discretion must be clarified. Transparency must be enhanced. The probability of being caught, as well as the penalties for corruption (for both givers and takers), must increase.

Each of these introduces a vast topic. But notice that none immediately refers to what most of us think of first when corruption is mentioned-that is, new laws, more controls, a change in mentality, or an ethical revolution. Laws and controls prove insufficient when systems do not exist in which to implement them. Moral awakenings do occur, but seldom by the design of our public leaders. If we cannot engineer incorruptible officials and citizens, we can nonetheless foster competition, change incentives and enhance accountability-in short, fix the systems that breed corruption.

~.liIr!.C::.I::I.I!,I!,"'!".r!.I::I.IiI.~r~r.II:Q1I' Fixing flawed systems is not easy. Successful examples of doing so exist, however, and they contain several common themes.

Punish some major offenders. Successful strategies begin by "frying a few big fish." When there is a culture of engaging in corrupt acts with impunity, the only way to begin breaking it up is for a number of major corrupt figures to be convicted and punished. The government should quickly identify a few major tax evaders, a few big bribe givers and a few high-level government bribe takers. Since a campaign against corruption can too often become a campaign against the opposition, the first big fish to be fried should be from the party in power.

Involve the people in diagnosing corrupt systems.

Successful campaigns against corruption involve the people.

If only they are consulted, citizens are fertile sources of information about where corruption is occurring. Ways of consulting them include carrying out systematic client surveys; setting up citizens' oversight bodies for public agencies; involving professional organizations; consulting with village and borough councils; and using telephone hot lines, call-in radio shows and educational programs. Business people and groups should participate with the protection of anonymity in studies of how corrupt systems of procurement, contracting and the like actually work. Such studies would emphasize systems and not individuals.

Focus on prevention by repairing corrupt systems.

Successful anticorruption efforts fix corrupt systems. They use a formula such as C = M + D - A to carry out "vulnerability assessments" of public and private institutions. Like the best public health campaigns, they emphasize prevention.

Of course, reducing corruption is not all that one needs to care about. If, for example, so much money were spent attacking corruption and so much red tape and bureaucracy were created that the costs and losses in efficiency outweighed the benefits of reduced corruption, such efforts would be counterproductive.

Ways in which countries can

design effective anticorruption strategies are the following: change the "agents" carrying out public activities, alter the incentives of these agents and of citizens, collect information in order to raise the probabilities of corruption being detected and punished, change the relationship between agents and citizens and increase the social consequences of corruption. In each case, one has to work through the putative benefits, as well as the many possible costs, of anticorruption activities.

Reform incentives. In many countries, public sector wages are so low that a family cannot survive on a typical official's salary. Moreover, measures of success are often lacking in the public sector, so that what officials earn is not linked with what they produce. It should be no surprise that corruption flourishes under such conditions.

Fortunately, around the world, experiments in both public and private sectors are emphasizing performance measurement and the overhauling of pay schemes. Fighting corruption is only one part of a broader effort that may be called institutional adjustment, or the systematic recasting of information and incentives in public and private institutions (Klitgaard, 1995). Institutional adjustment is the next big item on the development agenda.

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"What you say is fine," it might be argued, "but what if the people on top are themselves corrupt? What if international business people and local business cliques have powerful incentives to do the corrupting? If the people on top in the public and private sectors are benefiting, will the reforms you mentioned have a chance of taking hold?"

The worry is that corrupt officials on top are monopolists unwilling to sacrifice their rents, and international and local business people are locked in a prisoners' dilemma in which the dominant strategy is to bribe. A corrupt equilibrium is reached, as a result of which rulers and top civil servants and some private companies gain, but society loses.

What can be done in such a situation? The reflexive answer is "nothing." But consider the analogous question, "Why would national leaders, who are mindful of their self-interest, ever undertake free-market reforms, privatization and related policies, all of which sacrifice their personal control over the economy?" Yet such reforms have swept the world, as has the remarkable "third wave" of democratic reforms.

Some governments do, of course, resist establishing good governance. But in the decade ahead, the crucial problem will not be inducing governments to do something about corruption but rather helping them to decide what should be done and how. Because of democratic reforms, new leaders dedicated to fighting corruption and improving public administration are attaining power as never before. Election campaigns from Nicaragua to Pakistan feature corruption as a major issue. And not just in developing countries, as public

outcries about electoral campaigns in Italy and Spain, and negative publicity about campaign contributions in the United States, suggest. Many new leaders would like to improve customs and tax agencies, clean up campaign financing and elections, reduce bribery and intimidation in legal systems and the police, and, in general, create systems of information and incentives in the public sector that foster efficiency and reduce corruption. Their problem is not political will but know-how.

But it is also true that in many countries leaders are of two minds. They may appreciate and decry the costs of systematic corruption, but they may also recognize the personal and party benefits of the existing, corrupt system. To assist them in moving toward a long-term strategy, it is necessary for several steps to be taken.

First, leaders must see that it is possible to make systemic improvements without committing political suicide. Sensitive consulting and technical assistance may help leaders learn from anticorruption efforts elsewhere, adopt a systematic approach and analyze confidentially the many categories of political benefits and costs.

Second, in developing strategies, leaders must recognize that not everything can be done at once. They should undertake behind closed doors a kind of cost-benefit analysis, assessing those forms of corruption having the greatest economic costs (for example, corruption that distorts policies as opposed to determining who gets a specific contract) while considering where it will be easiest to make a difference. The anticorruption effort might begin where the public perceives the problem to be most acute. A good rule of thumb is that to be credible, an anticorruption campaign must achieve some tangible successes within six months.

Third, leaders need political insulation. International collaboration can help provide it, permitting countries to admit to a common problem ("corruption is not just our problem, or my party's, or my administration's") and move together to address it. Indeed, international conditionality that applies across many countries might help a national leader justify anticorruption measures that might otherwise be embarrassing or difficult to make credible.

D

.~.r..~~.~.Ar..~.Q.~A~ ..~.~.I.r..~.Ar.~V~.$ International cooperation can help engender both the will to fight corruption and the capability to do so. Despite the obvious sensitivity of devising and implementing strategies to combat systematic corruption, international organizations can-and, indeed, already do-help by providing aid to support democratic reforms, more competitive economies and improved governance. But a more focused effort is needed: a systematic attack on systematic corruption.

Let us consider some international initiatives that could help the incipient international movement against corruption.

• ~

EGIONAL DIAGNOSTIC

STUDIES

P~;P~;~·.:··S;:,;ch··st~d·i~s··~o~i·d··b~··d·~~·ig·~~d·to"~~'~o;:';~~ge the taking of systematic action by both the private and the public sectors to reduce corruption in a region (for example, Latin America or Francophone Africa).

Basic idea: Each country would invite the private sector to carry out confidential diagnostic surveys of three or four areas prone to corruption, such as government contracting, the courts, hospitals and revenue agencies. These surveys would ask business people confidentially to diagnose how corrupt systems might work in practice-that is, where the holes, weaknesses and abuses in the current systems might be. The idea is to analyze systems, rather than identify particular individuals in either the public or the private sector. The goal is not to do academic research but to obtain a quick assessment that can be used to formulate an action plan. Relevant information obtained from a small sample of 40 business people could well be sufficient to prepare a useful report. When each country's diagnostic study was complete, an international conference would share the results and analyze remedial measures, including possible international cooperation to combat corruption.

Political benefits: The fact that such a study was international would make it clear that corruption was not just a problem of country X, but an international problem needing international solutions. It would also emphasize that corruption is not just a problem of the government (or the current administration) and that the private sector is part of the problem and needs to be part of the solution. Political leaders would consequently be able to make the issue much more attractive politically. They could say that the diagnostic survey was being done continentwide-addressing, for example, the international dimensions of bribery as well as their countries' particular difficulties. And they could point out that the survey was being carried out by and encompassed both the private sector, members of which are usually complicit where corruption exists, and the public sector.

political contributions and party and campaign financing.

Tasks: In each area chosen, international organizations would create toolkits containing thefollowing: • Analytical frameworks for diagnosing and dealing with corruption. These would comprise not only generic frameworks but also specific ones for tax administration, customs administration, police, prosecution, judges, procurement and contracting.

• Case studies of best practices and successes in reducing corruption, at different levels of government and in different sectors and domains.

• Participatory pedagogues-a variety of devices to enable citizens, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, the media and government employees to learn, and teach each other, about corrupt systems and what to do about them.

G

[j99!.~1:J:$ Purpose: There is a clear need to accumulate and disseminate best practices in reducing corruption, by function, sector, level of government and other relevant categories.

Basic idea: International cooperation could help to assemble and disseminate examples of best practice, as well as frameworks for policy analysis-a combination that might be called "tool kits" for fighting corruption. Possible areas in which these might be developed are revenue raising, including tax and customs agencies; the justice system; health care (from hospitals to the importation and distribution of pharmaceuticals); and government procurement, licensing and contracting. Another possibility is an area where many industrial countries could make considerable improvements: the interfaces between money and politics, including

.~.~.~.~.~~.I.~.~ When corruption becomes systematic, fighting it must go beyond implementing liberal economic policies, enacting better laws, reducing the number and complexity of regulations and providing more training, helpful though these steps may be. Fighting systematic corruption requires administering a shock to disturb a corrupt equilibrium. It might include such steps as the following: • formation of a national coordinating body that is responsible for devising and following up on a strategy against corruption, along with a citizens' oversight board; • identification of a few key agencies or areas on which the anticorruption effort might focus its efforts in the first year, in the hope of achieving some momentum-building successes; • a capacity-building strategy within key ministries that takes the problems of incentives (including incentive reforms) and information seriously; and • identification of a few major offenders whose cases will be prosecuted.

Combating corruption should focus on the reform of systems. It requires an economic approach, coupled with great political sensitivity. The design and implementation of the measures this article has been discussing must obviously be tailored to each country's conditions, but, at the same time, international cooperation can make a difference. Sometimes this may mean providing specialized technical assistance-for example, by organizing high-level anticorruption workshops or strategic consulting, or hiring international investigators to track down ill-gotten deposits overseas. International cooperation can help national leaders develop political resolve. Finally, international action can convey the useful truth that we are all involved in the problem of corruption-and that we must find solutions together.

D About the Author: Robert Klitgaard is Dean and Ford Distinguished Professor of International Development and Security at the RAND Graduate School, Santa Monica, California.

Reprinted from U.S. News & World Report, February 23, 1998, published at Washington,

D,C.

The heyday of espionage did not end with the Cold War. A new breed of spy now speeds along the Information Highway, sometimes getting data legally, sometimes illegally hacking into computer security systems. Letter drops are old hat-though sleuths may search the company garbage dumpster for pay dirt. arold Worden is a soft-spoken engineer who worked for Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, for 28 years. A church-going man and a grandfather, he built his own home in the Rochester suburb of Hamlin, just a few miles from Lake Ontario, and served on the town council. He also had a second career: stealing industrial secrets, Worden was a key executive who helped design a top-secret device codenamed the 401 Machine. Kodak spent millions of dollars developing the machine to make a chemical compound called acetate. Because acetate is an essential building block of photographic film, the company that can make it smoother, better and cheaper has a big advantage in the market.

After retiring in 1992 at the age of 51, Worden set up a consulting business with offices in New York and South Carolina.

Unbeknownst to his former employer, Worden began recruiting Kodak employees and dozens of fellow retirees to funnel

H

a steady stream of proprietary information about the 401 Machine and other sensitive matters to him. He sold drawings and documents stamped "confidential" to Kodak rivals. Among his major customers, Kodak alleges in a suit, were the European subsidiaries of Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co., which makes everything from Post-it Notes to fiber optics.

3M denies it purchased internal Kodak documents. Worden pleaded guilty to transporting stolen property across state lines and started a IS-month prison term earlier this year.

America's corporate secrets are being targeted like never before. In the 1990s version of Spy vs. Spy, "white" spy and "black" spy no longer work for governments in the East or West but for competing companies in the global economy.

Businesses seek out competitive intelligence in many new ways, most of them entirely legal. But the search for secrets crosses the line of legality when a firm pays someone to steal confidential infor-

mation or break into a rival's computer system. The whole field is so cloaked with secrecy that details are hard to come by.

But in the United States alone, more than 1,100 incidents of illegal industrial espionage hit some 1,300 companies in 1996, up from 589 incidents and 246 companies in 1992, according to a survey by the American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS), the most definitive such study to date. The report says that the potential commercial value of information that is stolen could be as much as $300 billion.

The trend has given rise to an entire industry of "information brokers" and other consultants who specialize in tapping corporate secrets-by means both legal and illegal. In response, many companies are shoring up their defenses, doing everything from shredding more documents to hiring former CIA, FBI, Secret Service and military intelligence experts as security chiefs. Membership in ASIS, the main association for security chiefs, has grown by 20 percent (to 30,000) in three years.

The most recent case to hit the headlines involves allegations being examined by a grand jury that a Connecticut subsidiary of Reuters, the British news agency, improperly induced a consultant to transfer screens full of data from Bloomberg LP to Reuters. The American upstart Bloomberg has long enjoyed an advantage over its much older British

rival in the arcane but lucrative field of analyzing the price of bonds and predicting their movement. Prosecutors are investigating whether the consultant downloaded so much information that it might have helped Reuters design a better product. Reuters says it is unaware of any wrongdoing and is cooperating with the investigation.

"ft'r.' lor 'eeft If there's anyone trend driving the surge in corporate intelligence gathering, it is the ceaseless rise in the commercial value of technology. The huge research and development investments required to invent and perfect new technologies, plus the sheer speed of product cycles, have raised the stakes in the age-old quest to learn the other guy's secrets. At the same time, technological secrets are more exposed than ever. "The advent of the personal computer and the local area network means that a company's key intellectual property has gone from being locked in the safe somewhere to existing on bits of magnetic tape," says Alan Brill, a managing director of Kroll Associates, the New York-based private detective agency. And rather than security-minded chiefs running the computer systems, the people in charge are often techies who want more open systems that are linked with the Internet. Kroll describes corporate intelligence work as the fastest-growing part of its business.

Paradoxically, the very practices companies have adopted to make them more competitive can leave them more vulnerable to having their secrets plundered.

Massive downsizings, and a corresponding rise in both the use of temporary workers and the outsourcing of critical

functions like managing computer systems, can eradicate the very idea of employee loyalty. It was a temp, for example, who seized fiberglass-making secrets from Pittsburgh-based PPO Industries and tried to sell them to Owens Coming of Toledo before an FBI sting caught him. The case helps illustrate how the intelligence wars have extended far beyond high-tech. Many more businessesutilities, insurance, even cat litter and cosmetics-are developing competitive-intelligence units to keep track of rivals and protect crucial information about their products, costs and customers.

Hadria. away One clearly illegal method of industrial spying is computer intrusion. Sometimes hackers seize secrets for their own advantage. A group of hackers in St. Petersburg, Russia, for example, stole $10 million from Citibank in 1994 by tapping into its systems and transferring money to banks in seven different countries, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

But the FBI, which is playing an increasingly visible role in combating computer crime, says many intruders take great delight in penetrating corporate information systems and then spreading the word through the Internet about which firms are most vulnerable; that clears the way for consultants to gather secrets for sale.

There are far less intrusive-and completely legal-ways to use technology to attack a company's secrets. Corporate snoops have access to 12,300 databases, as counted by the Gale Directory of Databases, with billions of documents and bits of data. Since about half of these databases are accessible online, an outsider can search local newspapers, import-export

records, government filings and other sources to paint a detailed portrait of a competitor's strategies. One Texaco intelligence expert discovered critical information about a rival in the fuel-distribution business when that company deposited its internal newsletter in a local public library, which put the report online.

Even classified ads in local newspapers are monitored. Such ads can provide clues about the kinds of people a company wants and, by extension, its technological direction. A favorite tool for intelligence pros is an online employment service offered by the Monster Board (www.monster.com). which lists more than 50,000 job openings.

Dozens of other Web sites, some with sophisticated search engines, are also helpful. "The beauty of the new technology is that it's allowing people to dig very deeply," says Leonard Fuld, president of a competitive-intelligence firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that bears his name.

The most sophisticated corporate snoops know that piles of data, whether obtained legally or illegally, can be meaningless without the help of employees who understand how a particular technology is used.

To find those people, competitors can examine a company's own Internet home page, where key technical employees are often listed, along with their favorite Internet discussion sites. By studying that information and analyzing where their research has been published, outsiders can draw a "brain map" of who is most important to the company's success.

Key personnel can then be pumped for information or recruited by snoops posing as consultants or headhunters at trade shows. One common technique is the "phantom interview," in which third-party recruiters working for Company A pump

employees from Company B, even though no jobs are really available. That's considered unethical, but it is entirely legal.

General Electric is particularly well known for aggressive competitive-intelligence techniques, which sometimes result in its hiring its competition's best minds.

In one recent case, GE's medical products division based near Milwaukee approached the American subsidiary of Bayer's Agfa group to discuss ajoint venture that would have given GE access to the company's hot new technology of electronic medical imaging. Agfa's new Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) allow X-rays to be transmitted over phone lines for diagnosis.

Agfa declined to enter into ajoint venture; it later alleged in a suit that GE began improperly hiring its key executives who were familiar with the technology.

The most sensitive hire was Vishal Wanchoo, the vice president in charge of PACS. Chief Executive Jack Welch personally helped recruit Wanchoo, both companies acknowledge.

GE says it merely relied on headhunters to identify the key Agfa personnel. GE denies any wrongdoing and says it has stringent policies against using competitors' trade secrets when their employees are hired. The case was settled out of court, wrapped in the secrecy of a confidentiality agreement.

Wanchoo, meanwhile, is helping GE develop its electronic medical imaging business, whose success will come at the expense of his former employer.

In Kodak's case, senior executives began worrying about Worden after a recent retiree bragged at a holiday cocktail party in Rochester in early 1994 that he would soon be working for a European rival.

Company lawyer Brian O'Connor heard about it and met with the man. Kodak soon hired a former FBI official as its se-

curity chief and decided to set up an elaborate sting. An employee from Kodak's operations in China joined with another former FBI agent to pose as representatives of a Chinese enterprise that wanted the latest American technology. They approached Worden.

In a four-and-a-half-hour meeting in an Atlanta hotel room that Kodak secretly videotaped, Worden promised to help the two set up an advanced acetate factory in China. That was enough for a search warrant and the seizure of thousands of Kodak documents from Worden's retirement home. "We had a high-level, trusted employee who basically had the keys to the safe and the ability to walk out of the place," says Kodak General Counsel Gary Van Graafeiland.

One company that cooperated with an FBI sting rather than set up its own was Bristol-Myers Squibb. FBI agent John Hartmann established himself as a technology information broker in 1995 in Philadelphia. He soon was approached by the Yuen Foong Paper Co., a Taiwanese company, according to court documents.

Technical Director Hsu Kai-Lo and other employees sent a flurry of E-mails to Hartmann, searching for access to BristolMyers's Taxa I technology. Taxol is a semisynthetic anticancer drug similar in chemical structure to a natural substance that comes from bark of the yew tree.

Wlla'eyer " 'ake.

Hartmann met with the Taiwanese in Los Angeles in February 1996 and warned that it would be very expensive to license the Taxol technology. Hsu was recorded as saying, "We'll get it another way." In Emails, Hartmann told the Taiwanese that he had located a corrupt scientist at Bristol-Myers who would sell them the technology. Hsu was allegedly offering

If there's anyone trend driving the surge in corporate intelligence gathering, it is the ceaseless rise in the commercial value of technology.

$200,000 plus a percentage of his sales.

Finally, in June 1997, Hartmann met with Hsu and two colleagues in a hotel room in Philadelphia, along with the Bristol-Myers scientist posing as a traitor to his company. He produced documents clearly marked "confidential."

After a detailed discussion, other FBI agents knocked on the door and arrested the Taiwanese. They are currently on trial.

Thanks to the 1996 Economic Espionage Act, the FBI is becoming more involved in helping companies defend against intelligence attacks, primarily from abroad. The bureau's national security division concentrates on foreign-government-supported attacks on militarily important secrets held by companies, while the criminal division (including all white-collar and financial crimes) takes cases where foreign government sponsorship isn't suspected.

The creation in early 1996 of a new office called the Computer Investigations and Infrastructure Assessment Center also has given the FBI's efforts a boost. The office, with about 150 computer specialists, works with both the national security and criminal divisions as well as with other intelligence and law enforcement agencies to help companies defend themselves.

"The FBI has opened up to partnering better with corporate America," says PPG security chief Regis Becker, himself a former FBI agent. "They now view industrial secrets as part of national security."

Fha' ."n •• The agency plays a high-stakes cat-andmouse game every day with electronic interlopers. It has begun creating elaborate electronic traps to catch intruders-a challenge of mind-numbing complexity. In one case, an Argentine hacker hid electronically in the computer system of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, requiring the FBI to set electronic wiretaps that monitored 16,000 users. Overall, the FBI says it is investigating at least 250 cases of corporate computer break-ins.

The use of Internet searches and databases now allows spies to more quickly identify what they want to learn and who possesses the knowledge. "They [spies]

The vast majority of corporate intelligence gathering is from open sources and is perfectly legal. can be much more surgical," says Scott Harper, head of the FBI's national security division. "Technology allows the spy a better chance to start at a point where he senses a vulnerability."

The technology also allows information-attackers to take fewer risks in exposing themselves. In the old days, bad guys from the KGB would use "dead drops"-a trash can in a park, for example-to pick up information in an attempt to avoid detection. Today, a researcher can wittingly or unwittingly transfer secrets to an anonymous point in cyberspace, or a "virtual" dead drop. "The crimes these days are committed by people who leave no evidence," says Harper. "You can't go in and dust for prints."

Only a tiny fraction of corporate America's battles over secrets ever make it to the FBI's attention. One reason is that the bureau seems less interested when American companies are fighting each other. Another is that most companies don't want to reveal when they have been victimized. Instead of going public, executives often turn to a consultancy like Kroll, the private detective agency, to prevent a breach from happening again.

Experts like Kroll Managing Director Brill conduct audits of a company's ability to protect its secrets. In effect, he picks the corporation's locks-for its own good.

Given 48 hours and permission to place agents inside a company posing as temps, Brill can usually strip a company of valuable secrets. His team carries small devices that look like music CD players, but they are really portable CD writers available at most electronics stores. When a researcher goes out to lunch without turning off his or her computer, the Kroll detective can attach the device to the parallel port in back of the machine an make a perfect copy of the entire contents of the computer's hard disk without leaving a trace.

"If you're clever, you can even record mu-

sic on the first track of the CD so that if anyone stops you, you look completely innocent," says Brill.

He is amazed at how researchers often unwittingly reveal the secrets of the companies they work for. In one case, a software company worked with university researchers to develop an algorithm for a software product that was worth about $5 million. Yet Kroll searched the Internet and found that the academics already had posted their research-free-before the software company could get its product to market. Researchers, many of whom have an ardent belief that their knowledge should be widely shared, also take part in Usenet groups, which are highly targeted Internet chat rooms. "We've had a number of cases where people with detailed inside knowledge have been spilling the beans on the Internet," says Brill. "People asked them questions, and they would actually provide answers."

Sloppy, .Ioppy A surprising number of companies also engage in sloppy housekeeping, not fully monitoring wastepaper, for example. That sets the stage for information brokers to conduct what the pros call "Dumpster dives"-looking through a company's trash. Recycling offers other opportunities. "We followed the material that was getting recycled from one company and found it ended up on a conveyor belt where people were sorting it," says Brill.

"They get paid, say, $5 a page for all the paper from a certain company. They don't have to read anything."

Dumpster dives and brokering recycled materials fall into the legal gray zone. But the vast majority of today's corporate intelligence gathering is from open sources and is perfectly legal. Inside major companies, market researchers, librarians, strategic planners, business development managers and others are embracing new

competitive-intelligence techniques. Overall, the field is exploding. Membership in the Society of Competitive Intellig"ence Professionals has more than doubled in three years, to 6,400 members, with representatives from some of the largest U.S. companies.

This breed of corporate warriors draws up psychological profiles of rival companies' senior executives, seeking clues to their motivations. They track their competitors' fmancial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, order satellite photos to spot factory expansions and monitor the 2,000 new patents and the 5,000 new research papers that become available every day. Another favorite maneuver: sending consultants to visit the fire departments and local tax offices in a town where a competitor has a factory to examine blueprints that must be filed. Other consultants interview their rivals' suppliers, customers and former employees.

The trick, most experts agree, is combining electronic intelligence with human intelligence of the sort gathered at trade shows and even on airplane flights. Some air routes in and out of high-tech cities like San Jose, California, and Boston are known as intelligence gold mines. Consultant Fuld tells the story of how one of his employees overheard two Silicon Valley executives discussing their business plans on the bus ride from Narita airport to downtown Tokyo. When he revealed that he was an intelligence specialist who hadjust overheard their entire business plans, "They were shocked," Fuld recalls. "You may think you're 10,000 miles from home, but people are always listening."

That kind of carelessness is increasingly a thing of the past. Corporate America has never been more focused on the systematic pursuit of intelligence or more determined to prevent internal secrets from walking out the door. The battle is bound to intensify as more companies gear up defensive measures and as the nether world of consultants and brokers also expands. The corporate spy has come in from the cold.

D About the Author: William J. Holstein is senior editor of u.s. News & World Report.

launched from Earth, so space mining of otherwise mundane materials could be profitable-if outer-space construction were ever to become routine.

Other entrepreneurs have talked about private space missions.

But most of them have foundered on the shoals of very high initial investments. The key to SpaceDev's chances of success is Benson's intention to build, launch and operate the first mission on a budget of under $50 million-less than one-tenth of what the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) frequently spent on a single craft, until recent budget cuts trimmed their sails. To achieve these economies, the NEAP craft will use what Benson proudly calls "trailing-edge technology": prefabricated solar arrays, electronics, cameras and so forth. "We're proud of the fact we're not doing anything new," Benson says. "That all increases the chances of success." And with a price list of cargo space and scientific data that totals $120 million, Benson sees the potential to turn a profit beginning with the very first mission.

Not surprisingly for such a cutting-edge venture, no contracts have yet been signed. But already, SpaceDev announced in May, seven researchers have filed notices of intent that make them eligible to apply to NASA for funding to buy a ride on the NEAP craft. For each notice that results in a NASA-approved proposal, SpaceDev would earn $10 million to $12 million in revenue.

Although skeptics might question whether a software entrepreneur has the expertise to get into space, Benson has managed to convince a number of people well qualified in space science.

He first enlisted James Arnold, director ofUC's California Space Institute. Arnold, a senior science adviser on the Apollo missions, met Benson at a conference on potential uses of the moon in December 1996. Initially skeptical, Arnold was soon impressed by Benson's knowledge, energy and business acumen.

"It turned out to be a good fit," Arnold remarks, "and we have passed one milestone after another." Since the spring of 1997, a handful of scientists and students at UC San Diego have also been working to develop plans for the mission.

Scientific expertise, though crucial, won't be enough to get this mission off the ground; managerial know-how will also be required in spades. To fill that gap, SpaceDev acquired a small San Diego aerospace firm called Integrated Space Systems (ISS) in a stock trade this February to manage the mission development schedule and integrate the NEAP craft into a rocket.

ISS's business, though modest, is already profitable. Even so, the months ahead are critical to SpaceDev's success, as it must meet deadlines for fabricating the craft and hiring a seasoned mission manager, all the while courting prospective buyers of cargo space in the vehicle.

Playing with the Big Boys In addition to shoring up his logistical base and forming alliances among researchers, Benson has already impressed another critical constituency: NASA. The agency has discussed the possibility of helping SpaceDev by allowing the company to use NASA's network of deep space tracking stations for sending and receiving radio communications with the robotic spacecraft.

SpaceDev might pay for the time outright, or try to barter for it with data from radio science experiments using the craft.

"I think Jim has put together a very credible approach to what would be the first private exploratory mission," says Carl Pilcher, a NASA assistant associate administrator for space science. "If he can pull it off, it will be an interesting precedent for a new way to acquire scientific data." Pilcher praised the abilities of the scientists involved and their plan, saying he believes they "are capable of delivering on what they promise."

Benson believes that if he can get one craft into space, other opportunities will follow. Perhaps SpaceDev would help NASA in its plan to explore Mars by providing some services faster and at a lower cost than NASA can, he says. Possibilities include ferrying a communications relay satellite into orbit around the planet, or depositing equipment on Mars that would mix hydrogen and oxygen to produce fuel. NASA's Pilcher says the agency would listen to arguments for such deeper private participation.

Any Takers?

NASA's associate administrator for policy and plans, Alan M. Ladwig, shares Benson's belief that the time is right for private ventures into space. "If we are to get the true economic benefits of space, the private sector has to get involved, so we encourage that," Ladwig says. "It's going to happen sooner or later." But Ladwig cautions that SpaceDev will have to find markets beyond NASA. Finding a suitable market has been a challenge for Benson's competitors in the business of launching private space missions.

Michael Simon, the president of San Diego-based International Space Enterprises, has firsthand experience with the problem.

Simon wanted to launch payloads to the moon on Russian rockets. But finding it expensive and having few takers, his company is now designing hybrid-power road vehicles. Though Simon praises Benson for shrewd organization and for keeping start-up costs low, he adds that "for Benson it comes down to the same question that haunts all of us in the industry: 'Is there a market?'

And if there is, yes, he can pull it off."

For his part, Benson remains a believer. A veteran of the computer revolution, he believes the private space economy-using the energy of the private sector and building on the contributions of the government agencies that pioneered the field-might develop rapidly and surprise people, as the computer industry did two decades ago. In this scenario, he believes, SpaceDev could be midwife to a broader human presence in space, an era in which people not only explore but also build, work and perhaps even live beyond the confines of Earth.

Benson wears a wristwatch that is already counting down the seconds until SpaceDev's first liftoff, tentatively scheduled for October 3, 2000. "This could be a wake-up call," he says, "that the time has come to commercialize space."

D About the Author: David E. Graham is science correspondent the San Diego Union-Tribune.

of

Drawing by Mac. Reprinted with permission from the Saturday Evening Post Society, a division of BFL & MS, Inc. Copyright © )998.

"Other than accumulating frequent-flier miles, do you have any experience in.the aerospace industry?

Drawing by Eric & Bill; © 1998 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

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Drawing by A. Bacall. © 1997 from The New Yorker Collection.

All rights reserved.

Director & Chef The Diverse Repertory of Aijun Sajnani With his New York expertise, Bangalore's Arjun Sajnani has put his city on the theater and gourmet map of India.

What does Shrimp Diane in New Orleans Spicy Sauce have in common with A Night of American Comedy?

They're both products of a versatile 50-year-old Indian-American who creates works of art for the stage and for the diners in his restaurant, called "Sunny's."

Arjun Sajnani "put Bangalore on the theater map of this country," says Praxy Fernandes, former Finance Secretary of India, in his review of Kiss of the Spider Woman, which Arjun produced and directed in April 1998.

He's also brought gourmet "nouvelle cuisine" to the Garden City of Karnataka. Most Bangaloreans who love really first-rate Western food know they can find it at Sunny's on Lavelle Road. His menu contains American regional specialties plus Italian and French classics-all transmuted into masterpieces by Arjun's alchemy with nouvelle cuisine.

The Arjun Sajnani story starts in Delhi where he was born and raised. His theatrical interests showed in childhood. He and his two sisters would act out plays for their family with Arjun as director.

After high school he went to the U.S. to study literature and drama at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee. He graduated in 1968, having written an honors dissertation on William Faulkner and been active in campus drama. He did postgraduate studies in literature at the University of North Carolina but soon decided that theater was his calling. In 1969 he moved to New York to start acting in plays.

"Life for a young New York actor means a lot of unemployed hours," says Arjun, a tall strong man with a finely chiseled face and a cultured demeanor. He loves poetry, literature, music of all kindspop, classical, opera. He explained how in Manhattan many actors take part-time jobs in restaurants. He tried that scene for two years, leamed a lot about professional acting and directing, and returned to India in 1971.

He and his two sisters, Veenu and Renu, started a Bangalore dramatics company called "Theater Arts." After producing and directing several plays, Arjun felt it was time to go back to the U.S. to learn more about the theater world-and the restaurant world (although at that time he didn't realize he had a future in food as well as theater).

In 1978 he returned to New York. He got jobs with America's National Public Radio and won an NPR Best Spoken Arts award for his narration of "Taj Express" and for his voice character roles in radio dramatizations of Indian short stories. He also found acting jobs on Broadway including a role in the dramatic adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's novel, A Meeting by the River.

"It was in this play," Arjun says, "that I really learned the basics of how to direct drama. I learned patience. I learned how to deal with actors gently-for the most part!

I learned how to put together a production on the Broadway scale-and how easily all of it can flop on its face." His theatrical career was taking off.

So was his restaurant career. He worked as a captain in some of New York's most prestigious gourmet watering placesRegine's, Dock's, Raga, the Tavern on the Green and the elite Maxwell's Plum.

"Cooking always interested me-since my days as a student in Tennessee where Indian food was unknown and I had to cook for myself. In New York I became interested in the gourmet cuisine of the great restaurants where I worked. "A restaurant captain must know everything about the food his chef makes because he has to answer patrons' questions intelligently. A captain must know more than they do. The chefs briefed us everyday.

We had to know about the standard items on the menu and also the specialties of the day-what the dish contained, how it was prepared. It was a university education in high cuisine. I got so involved that I started cooking these things at home."

Besides learning from the chefs themselves, Arjun took courses in the culinary arts. He read books on cooking.

He studied wines because in many of his restaurants he had to be sommelier as

well as captain. He concentrated on the wines of California's small new "boutique vineyards"-the Cabernets and Chardonnays that became so popular in New York in the 1980s.

"In 1989-90 I worked with one of the greatest chefs in America, Mark Peel of Maxwell's Plum, and that was the turning point in my culinary education. I learned so many classic recipes from him. Some are on my menu here in Sunny's, such as the black pepper fettuccine with wild mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes and the angel hair pasta with tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and basil. Mark had come to New York from Spago's in San Francisco where he'd been one of the founders of California nouvelle cuisine."

After 14 years of Manhattan's theatercum-gourmet life, Arjun returned to Bangalore in 1992. He started a catering business. He rejuvenated his Theater Arts group and began producing and directing plays with a new zeal. Throughout his theater career in India, most of his productions have been American plays, including Star Spangled Girl by Neil Simon; Dial M for Murder by Frederick Knott; Deathtrap by Ira Levin; M. Butterfly by David Hwang; Kiss of the Spider Woman by Terrence McNally; Other People's Money by Jerry Sterner; Crucifer of Blood by Paul Giovanni; She Loves Me by Joe Masteroff, Jerry Bok and Sheldon Harnick; A Day in Hollywood and A Night in the Ukraine by Tommy Tune (who made the American versions of the original British productions). A Night in the Ukraine was a spoof on Marx Brothers comedies; Indian actors played Groucho, Chico and Harpo. These plays opened in Bangalore but he took many on the road-to Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta and Chennai.

"I love American drama," he says, "and feel good about having brought it to Bangalore and India." .

His favorite American playwrights are Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

Why hasn't he produced any of thei/' works?

"Because here the market for revivals is not great. Indian audiences crave 'new' things that have just made a splash in the

West End or on Broadway. I would like to do Miller and Williams because I think they have great relevance for India. Arthur Miller because of India's emerging middle class with its new value system. Tennessee Williams because of his portrayal of the disappearing value system of America's 'Old South' and a person's ability or inability to cope with that. But when I returned to India it was time to go with >the-, new things. I'd love to do a definitive Indian version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof!"

"Arjun is a great dir~ctor," says Christine Krishnasarni, 1 prOfeSSIonal actress who studied theater arts at the universities of Pittsburgh and Ottawa. "He's very demanding. When he's directing actors he knows exactly what he wants them to do and won't let up until they do it. He brought professional theater to Bangaloi~ "In New York, of course, he started as an actor and he still acts in his plays now and then. He's acted in two international films, Mira Nair's Kama Sutra and an Indo-Italian production The Triumph of Sandakan. He's a good actor and a good singer."

"Well, whatever Arjun's acting abilities," says Darius ("Just call me Tuffy") Taraporvala, "he's a better director than actor and we've all been telling him to stick to directing which is where his truly great talent is."

Tuffy is an old friend of Arjun and a Bangalore actor who has been in every one of Arjun's plays. Acting is a hobby.

His real job is Bangalore bureau chief for NDTV's "Star News." He played Mozart in the production of Amadeus that brought Arjun national fame. Tuffy's wife, Evie, is music director for the musical productions.

"Arjun has a feel for things theatrical.

He sees things others don't see. He brings these things out. He can see a scene before he creates it. Actually this is true whether the scene is in his theater or in his restaurant.

"He would give me a script to read and I wouldn't think much of it. But he had a picture in mind of what the end product of the play would be and eventually he would convince me that it would be a great play. And it would be! That's the

mark of a great director.

"In his restaurant he behaves exactly as in a rehearsal. He shouts at his performers to 'get it right.' He's not easy to work for.

He's a perfectionist. He has his eye on that end product. He knows what he wants and how to get it."

Arjun's Indian sponsor for his last six productions is Britannia Industries Ltd., a company interested in corporate support for the arts and cross-cultural artistic productions.

"We've sponsored many of his plays," says Ramesh Jayaraman, national marketing manager for Britannia, "because we believe the quality of the work he's doing is the best. Britannia has set aside a certain amount of money to spend on corporate sponsorship of the arts. One of our projects is sponsoring Arjun's plays."

Corporate sponsorship of culture and the arts is relatively new to India. But Britannia feels it's the wave of the future, and they want to be on that wave. They realize how much such sponsorship enhances a company's image.

Of Arjun, Jayaraman says, "We chose him because he is the best."

He's also the best chef and restauranteur in Bangalore-at least for Western cuisine.

"You see, everyone knows there is an art of theater," says Arjun, "but in my restaurant I'm trying to show that there is also an art of cooking."

He had begun his culinary career with his catering business, but he realized he needed a restaurant to make his mark. In 1995 he found a little town house on Lavelle Road in the heart of the city. He made the ground floor into a delicatessen cum patisserie and the two upper floors into a restaurant which he called "Sunny's"-named after his dog, "a gorgeous golden retriever born in Glen Rock, New Jersey." The restaurant opened September 24, 1995.

"It was a perfect time to open a New York type restaurant and delicatessen because Bangalore had become a cosmopolitan city. Foreigners and NRIs with global tastes were pouring into Bangalore to take advantage of the liberalization of India's economy."

Many of them were well-heeled yuppies who dined out a lot. Where could they find first-rate Western cuisine in Bangalore? Arjun was waiting in his kitchen to serve up the cold gazpacho soup of pureed tomatoes and peppers, or the spaghetti primavera (pasta with a medley of vegetables, tomatoes and cream), the lettuce with balsamic vinaigrette dressing, or the simple sandwich of avocado and zucchini on Italian bread still warm from the oven.

The restaurant is small and simple but elegant, with some 13 tables. Prices are not cheap but for the quality it's probably the "best buy" in India for gourmet Western food. One of the secrets of his success is that he's not an absentee-owner.

Arjun is that rarity in India, the restaurantowner who is always there. Not just "there" in a closed office or behind a cashier's desk, but in the kitchen wearing a white chef's apron, either cooking him-

self or supervising the chefs.

I sit with Arjun examining the menu.

"Most people say you serve Italian and French food, but you call it California nouvelle cuisine. Why? What is nouvelle cuisine and where did it start?"

"Don't all things start in California?" he says, though not seriously. "In the early 1980s California chefs learned that people were becoming more health con-

scious, seeking lighter foods with less animal fat. So they started using lighter sauces, made from olive oil instead of butter, and using herbs and spices in new ways. Fruits and vegetables are so abundant in California that they've alW'lys been part of California cuisine.

Restaurants were suddenly using more of them-with a bare minimum of cooking because the essence of nouvelle cuisine is freshness and lightness. They used this whole new approach on the specialties they had always servedfrom Italian, French, Mexican, Cajun, Creole and other American cuisines.

So nouvelle cuisine is sort of a 'Californization' of all those cuisines, blended together! I do that here. I take classic Italian dishes like fettuccine, spaghetti and other pastas and lighten them up, spice them a little, serve them with more sauce than they do in Italy where people like their pastas drier.

I also do classic American dishes such as barbecued chicken, Southern fried chicken, barbecued prawns and Aunt Sally's meat loaf. People can call my cuisine anything they want Western, Continental, Californian, French, Italian-as long as they enjoy it!"

The early 1980s was also a time when California vineyards were gaining world recognition (a fame begun when some of California's best wines "won" over some of France's bestwith French experts as the judges!in the famous Paris blind tasting of 1976).

California's premium vineyards were producing really fine vintages. People became more wine conscious, started using wines in cooking, drinking wines with their meals-and drinking less hard liquor before meals.

Sunny's cuisine really blossoms when accompanied by wine, and the restaurant allows you to bring your own. Most customers prefer the wines of Grover Vineyards, just a few miles north of the city, which are all made from French grapes and are India's finest vintages.

There's the Grover red, which is worldclass with superb balance and the authen-

A meticulous director on stage or in the kitchen, Sajnani works alongside kitchen staff at Sunny's. When the restaurant started out in 1995 the clientele was 60 percent foreign to 40 percent Indian.

Now the percentages have reversed.

tic aroma and flavor of the classic Cabernet Sauvignon grape. There's a fruity but dry white made from Clairette, the grape used in many of the white Rhone Valley wines of southern France. There's a dry rose and a "demi-sec" (slightly sweet) rose that goes well with spicy foods.

We are talking in the peak of the lunch hour in the little sidewalk cafe just outside the door that says: DELICATESSEN, BISTRO, PATISSERIE.

"My deli is like any New York gourmet delicatessen, given Indian limitations. We sell quiches, bologna, salami, smoked salmon, Dijon mustard, wine vinegar and imported cheeses such as Parmesan,

Gruyere, Roquefort and Emmenthaler.

The patisserie serves homemade breads and pastries."

Arjun now and then dashes inside to make sure his cooks were getting the proportions correct with the white wine and cream sauce for the seer fish-or with the garlic, lemon and butter sauce for the grilled scampi.

The pastry chef is his friend and business partner, Vivek, and he has three other cooks working under him in the kitchen.

"All four of us work as a team. I like the concept of democracy in the kitchen. I want to have a system whereby they can get ahead, move up the ladder, which is an aspect of America I liked. It's a value I'm trying to teach my staff."

"Do the other cooks taste what they are making while cooking it?"

"Yes. This is vitally important. They've learned what a vinaigrette dressing should taste like, what the black pepper cream sauce on the fettuccine should taste like."

What percentage of the clientele is Indian?

"When we started," he says, "it was 60 percent to 40 percent foreign to Indian.

Last year it was about 50-50. Now it's about 60-40 Indian to foreign. The young international global set-business and computer people, scientists and academics-move back and forth between India and America and they've developed a taste for really fine Western food. And we provide it."

I ask about theatrical plans for the future. Arjun's gearing up to do his fIrst play by an Indian playwright, Girish Karnad's The Fire and the Rain.

"Girish wrote the English script for the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and it was perfected in a workshop there, with American actors. It's never been done in English in a full production. So this will be a first."

His culinary plans? They involve "drama" too. He'd like to get The Sunny Show on Indian television-a TV show teaching people how to cook, like Julia Child's televised cooking lessons on American TV. Her show on French cooking was immensely popular, and it helped revolutionize American tastes.

"Julia is great as an actress as well as cook-she sweats away under the television lights, chopping, cutting, talking, now and then sipping from a glass of wine, teaching the art of French high cuisine in a earthy, homely, viewer-friendly way. That's what I'd like to do-starting from scratch-teaching viewers the basic things such as how to choose the right cutting or chopping instruments, how to slice an onion the right way. These little details are all part of the art of cooking."

I ask if his two callings-directing a play and running a restaurant-had anything in common.

"Quite a lot," he says. "Running a restaurant is like running a play. Opening time. Curtain up. Everyone must be ready.

The stage must be perfect-the lighting, the set, the costumes, every little detail. I approach opening time every day in the restaurant the way I approach opening time in a play I direct. The experience of dealing with actors, cooks and waiters is similar. The important thing is getting them to do what you want them to do in the show, whether 'the show' is on the stage or on the restaurant tables. Putting together a scene that has purpose, punch, meaning, emotion, values. Putting together the food, the dishes, is part of it all.

Emphasize details.

"I concentrate on details in directing a theatrical scene so that the scene will look perfect when the show goes on. I concentrate on details when putting food on a plate to be served-so that it will look perfect. A perfect pasta is like a work of art, but so is the serving of it. A total work of art-the food, the serving, the ambience. Sometimes you fail and sometimes you win. Just do your very best, and seven out of ten times you'll win-both in a theatrical performance and a restaurant performance."

Arjun's fans want him to keep creating these winning works of art. They demand that-in theater and restaurant-"The

About the Author: Stephen Espie, an alumnus of Time-Life, Gourmet and SPAN magazines, is now a freelance writer who lives in Bangalore.

of the gift economy to later sprout in the commercial economy's efficiencies.

It's a rare (and foolish) software outfit these days that does not introduce its wares into the free economy as a beta version in some fashion. Fifty years ago, the notion of releasing a product unfinished -with the intention that the public would help complete it-would have been considered either cowardly, cheap or inept. But in the new regime, this precommercial stage is brave, prudent and vital.

In the Network Economy, follow the free.

8 The Law of the Allegiance +*., ;;,,*••

Feed the web first The distinguishing characteristic of networks is that they have no clear center and no clear outer boundaries. The vital distinction between the self (us) and the nonself (them)-once exemplified by the allegiance of the industrial-era organization manbecomes less meaningful in a Network Economy. The only "inside" now is whether you are on the network or off. Individual allegiance moves away from organizations and toward networks and network platforms. (Are you Windows or Mac?) Thus, we see fierce enthusiasm from consumers for open architectures. Users are voting for maximizing the value of the network itself. Companies have to play this way, too. As consultant John Hagel argues, a company's primary focus in a networked world shifts from maximizing the firm's value to maximizing the value of the infrastructure whole. For instance, game companies will devote as much energy promoting the platform -the tangle of users, developers, hardware manufactures, etc.as they do their product. Unless their web thrives, they die.

The net is a possibility factory, churning out novel opportunities by the diskful. But unless this explosion is harnessed, it will drown the unprepared. What the computer industry calls "standards" is an attempt to tame the debilitating abundance of competing possibilities. Standards strengthen a network; their constraints solidify a pathway, allowing innovation and evolution to accelerate. So central is the need to tame the choice of possibilities that organizations must make the common standard their first allegiance. Companies positioned at the gateway to a standard will reap the largest rewards. But as a company prospers, so do those in its web.

A network is like a country. In both, the surest route to raising one's own prosperity is raising the system's prosperity. The one clear effect of the industrial age is that the prosperity individuals achieve is more closely related to their nation's prosperity than to their own efforts.

The net is like a country, but with three important differences: • No geographical or temporal boundaries exist-relations flow 24 by 7 by 365.

• Relations in the Network Economy are more tightly coupled, more intense, more persistent and more intimate in many ways than those in a country.

• Multiple overlapping networks exist, with multiple overlapping allegiances.

Yet, in every network, the rule is the same. For maximum prosperity, feed the web first.

9

The Law of Devolution

Let go at the top The tightly linked nature of any economy, but especially the Network Economy's ultraconnected constitution, makes it behave ecologically. The fate of individual organizations is not dependent entirely on their own merits, but also on the fate of their neighbors, their allies, their competitors and, of course, on that of the immediate environment.

Some biomes in nature are shy of opportunities for life. In the Arctic there are only a couple of styles of living, and a species had better get good at one of them. Other biomes are chock full of opportunities, and those possibilities are in constant flux, appearing and retreating in biological time as species jockey toward maximum adaptability.

The rich, interactive and highly plastic shape of the Network Economy resembles a biome seething with action. New niches pop up constantly and go away as fast. Competitors sprout beneath you and then gobble your spot up. One day you are king of the mountain, and the next day there is no mountain at all.

Biologists describe the struggle of an organism to adapt in this biome as a long climb uphill, where uphill means greater adaptation. In this visualization, an organism that is maximally adapted to the times is situated on a peak. It is easy to imagine a commercial organization substituted for the organism. A company expends great effort to move its butt uphill, or to evolve its product so that it is sitting on top, where it is maximally adapted to the consumer environment.

All organizations (profit and nonprofit alike) face two problems as they attempt to find their peak of optimal fit. Both are amplified by a Network Economy in which turbulence is the norm.

First, unlike the industrial arc's relatively simple environment, where it was fairly clear what an optimal product looked like and where on the slow-moving horizon a company should place itself, it is increasingly difficult in the Network Economy to discern what hills are highest and what summits are false.

Big and small companies alike can relate to this problem. It's unclear whether one should strive to be the world's best hard disc manufacturer when the mountain beneath that particular peak may not be there in a few years. An organization can cheer itself silly on its way to becoming the world's expert on a dead-end technology. In biology's phrasing, it gets stuck on a local peak.

The harsh news is that getting stuck is a certainty in the new economy. Sooner, rather than later, a product will be eclipsed at its prime. While one product is at its peak, another will move the

mountain by changing the rules.

There is only one way out. The organism must devolve. In order to go from one high peak to another, it must go downhill first and cross a valley before climbing uphill again. It must reverse itself and become less adapted, less fit, less optimal.

This brings us to the second problem. Organizations, like living beings, are hard-wired to optimize what they know and to not throw success away. Companies find devolving (a) unthinkable and (b) impossible. There is simply no room in the enterprise for the concept of letting go-let alone the skill to let go-of something that is working, and trudge downhill toward chaos.

And it will be chaotic and dangerous down below. The definition of lower adaptivity is that you are closer to extinction. Finding the next peak is suddenly the next life-or-death assignment.

But there is no alternative (that we know of) to leaving behind perfectly good products, expensively developed technology and wonderful brands and heading down to trouble in order to ascend again in hope. In the future, this forced march will become routine.

The biological nature of this era means that the sudden disintegration of established domains will be as certain as the sudden appearance of the new. Therefore, there can be no expertise in innovation unless there is also expertise in demolishing the ensconced.

In the Network Economy, the ability to relinquish a product or occupation or industry at its peak will be priceless. Let go at the top.

10 The Law of Displacement The net wins Many observers have noted the gradual displacement in our economy of materials by information. Automobiles weigh less than they once did and perform better. The missing materials have been substituted with nearly weightless high-tech knowhow in the form of plastics and composite fiber materials. This displacement of mass with bits will continue in the Network Economy.

Whereas once the unique dynamics of the software and computer industry (increasing returns, following the free, etc.) were seen as special cases within the larger "real" economy of steel, oil, automobiles and farms, the dynamics of networks will continue to displace the old economic dynamics until network behavior becomes the entire economy.

For example, take the new logic of cars as outlined by energy visionary Amory Lovins. What could be more industrial-age than automobiles? However, chips and networks can displace the industrial age in cars, too. Most of the energy a car consumes is

used to move the car itself, not the passenger. So, if the car's body and engine can be diminished in size, less power is needed to move the car, meaning the engine can be made yet smaller, which means that the car can be smaller yet, and so on down the similar slide of compounded value that microprocessors followed. That's because smart materials-stuff that requires increasing knowledge to invent and make-are shrinking the steel.

Detroit and Japan have designed concept cars built out of ultralightweight composite fiber material weighing about 1,000 pounds, powered by hybrid-electric motors. They take away the mass of radiator, axle and drive shaft by substituting networked chips. Just as embedding chips in brakes made them safer, these lightweight cars will be wired with network intelligence to make them safer: a crash will inflate the intelligence of multiple air bags-think smart bubblepak.

The accumulated effect of this substitution of knowledge for material in automobiles is a hypercar that will be safer than today's car, yet can cross the continental U.S. on one tank of fuel.

Already, the typical car boasts more computing power than your typical desktop PC, but what the hypercar promises, says Lovins, is not wheels with lots of chips, but a chip with wheels.

A car can rightly be viewed as headed toward becoming a solid state module. And it will drive on a road system increasingly wired as a decentralized electronic network obeying the Network Economy's laws.

Once we see cars as chips with wheels, it's easier to imagine airplanes as chips with wings, farms as chips with soil, houses as chips with inhabitants. Yes, they will have mass, but that mass will be subjugated by the overwhelming amount of knowledge and information flowing through it, and, in economic terms, these objects will behave as if they had no mass at all. In that way, they migrate to the Network Economy.

Nicholas "Atoms-to-Bits" Negroponte guesstimates that the Network Economy will reach $1 trillion by 2000. What this figure doesn't represent is the scale of the economic world that is moving onto the Internet-that grand net of interconnected objects-as the Network Economy infiltrates cars and traffic and steel and com. Even if all cars aren'tsold online right away, the way cars are designed, manufactured, built and operated will depend on network logic and chip power.

The question "How big will online commerce beT' will have diminishing relevance, because all commerce is jumping onto the Internet. The distinctions between the Network Economy and the industrial economy will fade to the difference of animated versus inert. If money and information flow through something, then it's part of Network Economy.

In the Network Economy, the net wins. All transactions and objects will tend to obey network logic.

11 The Law of Churn Seek sustainable disequilibrium In the industrial perspective, the economy was a machine that was to be tweaked to optimal efficiency, and, once finely tuned, maintained in productive harmony. Companies or industries especially productive of jobs or goods had to be protected and cherished at all costs, as if these firms were rare watches in a glass case.

As networks have permeated our world, the economy has come to resemble an ecology of organisms, interlinked and coevolving, constantly in flux, deeply tangled, ever expanding at its edges. As we know from recent ecological studies, no balance exists in nature; rather, as evolution proceeds, there is perpetual disruption as new species displace old, as natural biomes shift in their makeup, and as organisms and environments transform each other. So it is with the network perspective: companies come and go quickly, careers are patchworks of vocations, industries are indefinite groupings of fluctuating firms.

Change is no stranger to the industrial economy or the embryonic information economy; Alvin Toffler coined the term future shock in 1970 as the sane response of humans to accelerating change. But the Network Economy has moved from change to churn.

Change, even in its toxic form, is rapid difference. Churn, on the other hand, is more like the Hindu god Shiva, a creative force of destruction and genesis. Churn topples the incumbent and creates a platform ideal for more innovation and birth. It is "compounded rebirth." And this genesis hovers on the edge of chaos.

Donald Hicks of the University of Texas studied the half-life of Texan businesses for the past 22 years and found that their longevity has dropped by half since 1970. That's change. But Austin, the city in Texas that has the shortest expected life spans for new businesses, also has the fastest-growing number of jobs and the highest wages. That's churn.

Hicks told his sponsors in Texas that "the vast majority of the employers and employment on which Texans will depend in the year 2026-or even 2006-do not yet exist." In order to produce three million new jobs by 2020, 15 million new jobs must be created in all, because of churn. "Rather than considering jobs as a fixed sum to be protected and augmented, Hicks argued, the state should focus on encouraging economic churning-on continually re-creating the state's economy," writes Jerry Useem in Inc., a small-business magazine that featured Hicks's report. Ironically, only by promoting churn can long-term stability be achieved.

This notion of constant churn is familiar to ecologists and those who manage large networks. The sustained vitality of a complex network requires that the net keep provoking itself out of balance. If the system settles into harmony and equilibrium, it

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will eventually stagnate and die.

Innovation is a disruption; constant innovation is perpetual disruption. This seems to be the goal of a well-made network: to sustain a perpetual disequilibrium.

As economists (such as Paul Romer and Brian Arthur) begin to study the Network Economy, they see that it, too, operates by poising itself on the edge of constant chaos. In this chaotic churn is lifegiving renewal and growth.

The difference between chaos and the edge of chaos is subtle.

Apple Computer, in its attempt to seek persistent disequilibrium and stay innovative, may have leaned too far off-balance and unraveled toward extinction. Or, if its luck holds, after a neardeath experience in devolution it may be burrowing toward a new mountain to climb.

The dark side of churn in the Network Economy is that the new economy builds on the constant extinction of individual companies as they're outpaced or morphed into yet newer companies in new fields. Industries and occupations also experience this churn. Even a sequence of rapid job changes for workerslet alone lifetime employment-is on its way out. Instead, careers-if that is the word for them-will increasingly resemble networks of multiple and simultaneous commitments with a constant churn of new skills and outmoded roles.

Networks are turbulent and uncertain. The prospect of constantly tearing down what is now working will make future shock seem tame. We, of course, will challenge the need to undo established successes, but we'll also find exhausting the constant, fierce birthing of so much that is new. The Network Economy is so primed to generate self-making newness that we may find this ceaseless tide of birth a type of violence.

Nonetheless, in the coming churn, the industrial age's titans will fall. In a poetic sense, the prime task of the Network Economy is to destroy-company by company, industry by industry-the industrial economy. While it undoes industry at its peak, it weaves a larger web of new, more agile, more tightly linked organizations between its spaces.

Effective churning will be an art. In any case, promoting stability, defending productivity and protecting success can only prolong the misery. When in doubt, churn. In the Network Economy, seek sustainable disequilibrium.

12 The Law of Inefficiencies Don't solve problems In the end, what does this Network Economy bring us?

Economists once thought that the coming age would bring supreme productivity. But, in a paradox, increasing technology has not led to measurable increases in productivity.

This is because productivity is exactly the wrong thing to care about. The only ones who should worry about productivity are

robots. And, in fact, the one area of the economy that does show a rise in productivity has been the U.S. and Japanese manufacturing sectors, which have seen about a 3 to 5 percent annual increase throughout the 1980s and in to the 1990s. This is exactly where you want to find productivity. But we don't see productivity gains in the misnamed catch-all category, the service industry-and why would we? Is a Hollywood movie company that produces longer movies per dollar more productive than one that produces shorter movies?

The problem with trying to measure productivity is that it measures only how well people can do the wrong jobs. Any job that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated.

Peter Drucker has noted that in the industrial age, the task for each worker was to discover how to do his job better; that's productivity. But in the Network Economy, where machines do most of the inhumane work of manufacturing, the task for each worker is not "how to do this job right" but "what is the right job to doT' In the coming era, doing the exactly right next thing is far more "productive" than doing the same thing better. But how can one easily measure this vital sense of exploration and discovery?

It will be invisible to productivity benchmarks.

Wasting time and being inefficient are the way to discovery.

The Web is being run by 20-year-olds because they can afford to waste the 50 hours it takes to become proficient in exploring the Web. While 40-year-old boomers can't take a vacation without thinking how they'll justify the trip as being productive in some sense, the young can follow hunches and create seemingly mindless novelties on the Web without worrying about whether they are being efficient. Out of these inefficient tinkerings will come the future.

In the Network Economy, productivity is not our bottleneck.

Our ability to solve our social and economic problems will be limited primarily by our lack of imagination in seizing opportunities, rather than trying to optimize solutions. In the words of Peter Drucker, as echoed recently by George Gilder, "Don't solve problems, seek opportunities." When you are solving problems, you are investing in your weaknesses; when you are seeking opportunities, you are banking on the network. The wonderful news about the Network Economy is that it plays right into human strengths. Repetition, sequels, copies and automation all tend toward the free, while the innovative, original and imaginative all soar in value.

Our minds will at first be bound by old rules of economic growth and productivity. Listening to the network can unloose them. In the Network Economy, don't solve problems, seek opportunities.

0 About the magazine.

Author:

Kevin

Kelly

is executive

editor

of Wired

JI

HOWMUCH COMPUTER?

DVD video playback. The Compaq and Hewlett-Packard computers we tested use software-based video play-back from DVDs, which taxes the main processor.

Playing video precludes other applications from running at the same time and makes it impractical to run a video-based interactive game on DVD. For now, you're better off buying a computer with hardware-based video playback.

Recommendations • First, consider upgrading your existing computer's memory, modem or hard drive. That makes sense especially if the machine runs on a 166-MHz or faster Pentium processor. Even a new $1,000 machine will cost you more than a thorough upgrade and probably won't offer much of an edge in performance.

• If an upgrade isn't practical, look at high-rated inexpensive computers like IBM Aptiva £26, $800, the Compaq

Presario 4540, $950, or the HewlettPackard 8240, $1,100.

• If you want more power or the newest features, look to higher-priced computers. The Dell, Gateway and Micron, all sold by mail, are quite similar and performed very well. The Hewlett-Packard 8280, $2,300, performed consistently well.

• Apple devotees won't be disappointed by the fast, well-designed Power Macintosh G3/266.

D

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Of the world's estimated 6,000 languages, between 20 percent and 50 percent are no longer spoken by children. "These languages are obviously headed for extinction unless there are radical changes," says Michael Krauss, director of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Only about 300 languages are "safe" from extinction, he says, either because they have so many speakers-a million or more-or because they have strong government support. Krauss predicts that between 90 percent and 95 percent of languages may be extinct or headed for extinction by the year 2100. Languages are vanishing not only because of cultural assimilation but also because, in some places, those in power force minorities to give up their native speech.

Worldwide, languages are disappearing even faster than animal species. In many places, native cultures and their

languages are threatened by the same forces that threaten biodiversity, such as deforestation. "A conservative guess, over the next century, is that 20 languages per year will die," says Krauss.

In the United States, California has the greatest diversity of languages. Linguist Leanne Hinton of the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that at least one language native to California goes extinct every year.

What's so bad about losing languages? Some linguists argue that the world is less interesting and beautiful with fewer languages. Others lament the loss of knowledge embedded in language-the medicinal uses of plants, for example. The loss of a language also means the loss of a different way of looking at the world. Krauss even argues that linguistic diversity constitutes an ecosystem of sorts, a "logosphere" within which the human species evolved, and on which it depends.

Fortunately, there's an easy way to preserve diversity: bilingualism. "You never need to lose your own language," says Krauss, "sidce anybody can learn a second one."

-Dawn Stover

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