always the beautiful answer
who asks a more beautiful question
-- e.e. cummings

New things inevitably bring out questions in us: What is genuinely new? How can we create new things? How can we effectively respond to the new things that affect us? How do we appreciate what new really is?

In The New New Thing, a book on Netscape founder Jim Clark, author Michael Lewis observed that Clark had paused when describing his work: "On the line that asked him to state his occupation, he did not know what to write. There was no name for what he did." David Bowie had a similar reaction when giving a commencement address at the Berklee College of Music, in 1999: "As always on occasions like this, I really never know what to do -- which is pretty much the way that I've handled my career as a musician-writer." What is it about new things that stops both successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and rock stars in their tracks?

If we have learned anything about the end of the first phase of the Internet and the new economy, it is that we must be forceful questioners about what will be genuinely new and exciting in the second phase. Following the recent correction in the capital markets, we have witnessed a massive shift back to the future as defined by old-industry players. Many of the first-phase startups have exited, and even the strongest players -- like Amazon.com and Yahoo! -- are refocusing or scaling back. We've replaced long-term optimism with both the new and a focus on short-term profitability and a heightened assessment of operations and financial control. The need for short-term answers has replaced the tolerance for not knowing what to do -- but always asking what to do next -- that we developed during this recent period of rapid change.

But this too will change. As questioners, we are suspicious of single-factor analyses. The capital markets have changed, but technology is still evolving, and a driving curiosity in the new remains. The music industry is a case in point. Two years ago, the industry committed itself to a proprietary hardware and software encryption scheme for digital-music distribution, called the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). That initiative was the industry's response to a bevy of new intermediaries like MP3.com and Napster, which were intent on rewriting the rules for how music and the Internet would meet in the future. The new was confronting the old.

Napster now has over 50 million users worldwide, and despite continuing legal challenges, the technology for peer-to-peer file sharing that the company introduced is widely disseminated in key consumer markets worldwide. MP3.com has over 117,000 artists posting music to its site, which is viewed by approximately 725,000 daily users. These numbers could be reasonably defined as new. The industry consortia SDMI, on the other hand, continues to work on releasing its content-protection scheme to its 200-odd corporate members. This is the difference between consumer- and producer-led markets.

One of the great questioners of the 20th century was Richard Feynman, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 1965, but who was more popularly known for his New York Times best-selling book, 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman': Adventures of a Curious Character, and for his role in the Rogers Commission hearings on the 1986 Challenger accident. Frustrated by the commission's bureaucracy and the evasive answers that were given by key witnesses, Feynman conducted a live, impromptu experiment that resolved a key point in the investigation: He dunked a piece of the rocket booster's O-ring into a cup of ice water and showed that it lost all resiliency at low temperatures.