I was in the car driving with my father-in-law recently, and he told me about a dinner conversation that he had with a customer in Boston a few days ago.  He works in the process engineering industry and spends many of his days traveling around to manufacturing plants as a technical consultant and selling them manufacturing equipment designed to improve their processes.  The conversation, he says, went through the normal "how's your golf swing these days?" small talk to finally a deep discussion about the power of online mediums to cultivate and nurture business relationships.  To his utter dismay, the gentleman stated quite confidently that there is "no need to focus any attention on a website in this industry."  He further stated that there is plenty of business to be had by conducting it offline in the way he always had and that a website and related information systems are just not necessary.

I feel that my reaction to my father-in-law’s little anecdote was fairly natural -- I pulled out my iPhone, navigated away from my realtime traffic information site and tapped the calendar application that synchronizes with my Outlook database that's also tied to my online Google Apps.  Yep, the year is 2007.  Who knew?