The dilemma

After I'd written "Magical A-Life Avatars", I worked for several months on refinements to the cafe software. I created an intelligent database that could pull up details of a list of contacts to be able to bring the right combination of people together at a table to solve any kind of problem. It could be used by entrepreneurs, auteurs, specialists, experts, freelancers, executive managers, team leaders and managers. I had in mind that this could form the basis of a viable e-business.

When I'd finished the prototype, I started to think about how I could market this software. This is when I discovered creating a product is only a small part of creating a viable e-business. How would it be financed? How would it be marketed. What competition would there be? Would somebody copy my mousetrap and come up with a better version backed up by millions of dollars of investment capital? It was then that I took a serious look at the world of e-business and came up with a list of problems similar to that list of initial assumptions described in the introduction.

The more I thought about e-business the more paradoxes I discovered. It was a world of uncertainty and change and even if I raised a million dollars in venture capital there would be no guarantee of success. This was an environment that I had never before encountered.

Then the thought struck me that the cafe I'd been working on for months was supposed to be able to solve any kind of problem. Could I use the cafe to solve the problem of how to create a viable e-business? It had to be in the form of a strategy. How could I use the cafe to create a strategy? How could I use the cafe to understand the Internet and the e-business environment?

It was in puzzling about how I could use the cafe to develop an intangible concept such as a strategy that the idea of a book came to mind. Whereas trying to focus cafe discussions on a vague concept like a strategy might be difficult, it would be easy to focus discussions on the content of a book. For this I could use potential readers to give me guidance.