When the World Wide Web was young, really just embryonic, I worked for a company that ran successful technology trade shows. This company wanted to be on the cutting edge, so I found myself on a team charged with building a three-dimensional virtual trade show on the Web. Our team met in person constantly, ignoring what our own experience was telling us about the limits and possibilities of virtual work and the potential for online events. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to build elaborate virtual booth space to sell to our exhibitor customers. “Attendees” could stroll the virtual aisles, collecting virtual brochures and tchotchkes (promotional knick-knacks) as though there were no difference between the Javits Convention Center in New York City and a computer screen.

We failed to see that our assumptions about how people would adapt to networked meetings were leading us down a blind alley. Even though technology was changing trade shows, we assumed that people would still be looking for all the flourishes of the physical events. In retrospect, I would say we were praying that the Internet did not mean the end of meeting in physical venues with tens of thousands of other people to collect brochures and listen to sales pitches. And our tools, which let us create all sorts of nifty virtual realities, encouraged errors every step of the way, precisely because we were not thinking critically about how those tools were reshaping the services our company offered.