The last drop.

I think nowadays the worldwide business mentality is based on fear. Fear of being outran by the competitors behind and fear of not catching up with those ahead. “Fear” “not” “outran” minus*minus=plus, right? Then why not just running forward as fast as you can, not waiting for the pursuer to bump you? All because of oil  Really. I’ll try to explain my tangled logic.
Oil is something that, as we know, powers most (or all) of our needs. And we know that oil is not going to be here forever, we will run out of it sooner or later. And everyone is trying to take their barrel now, before someone else has taken it. Now imagine – we have a cheap, reliable source of power (which we actually do have, no doubt). Why struggling to get more of it if it’s practically unlimited? Better concentrate on innovating, because when the energy sources are widely available it all becomes to be about having THE BEST, not THE MOST.
My opinion – things will change fundamentally ONLY when the last drop of oil falls into a shell-branded barrel. In the meantime we best accumulate knowledge, while it’s cheap to get (and in Russia it’s still free ;)).
Innovation should be a necessity, not a need.
That is why I don’t think that the time for new business models on the web has already come – all should be synchronized, harmonized and so on…