In the '80s, I worked on a series of magazine articles with a group of McKinsey & Co. consultants about developing high-technology products. One article championed the then-revolutionary idea that developing products faster than your competitors was more than a sensible business practice. The article's main point was that being faster to market had a measurable bottom-line benefit, and it touched off many new rounds of rapid product development races among vendors.

Why the lesson in pre-Web history? Last week, I got an e-mail from the article's author, Donald Reinertsen. After that piece on speeding new product development, he went on to write two books on the topic ("Managing the Design Factory" and "Developing Products in Half the Time") and created a successful consulting practice on his own. As he noted in the e-mail, the speed of product development is at the point where Internet speed rules. Being last to the Net guarantees failure.

Over the next 12 months, I suspect that high-tech vendors will use the concept of getting to the Web faster as their strategic central theme. End users are ready to build out their Web infrastructures, and they are ready to listen to vendors that can fulfill that goal. Some recent examples:

Microsoft still seems unsure of what should be the central message for Windows 2000. It should be a promise to more quickly build a Net infrastructure. But the company is mired in promoting an extensive benefits list without saying what all those benefits mean in sum. The one Microsoft product over the past 12 months that did the best job of providing a simple, comprehensible message about getting to the Web faster was FrontPage 2000. This version of Microsoft's Web creation tool was such a significant advance over previous editions that it was a must-have upgrade for any previous user and worthy of a look from customers using competitive products.

The Sun-Netscape (remember Netscape?) combination on server business seems ready to bear some fruit. The combination—characterized as an alliance springing from a Sun-AOL joint effort—is developing products under the iPlanet brand. The most interesting product so far is the wireless server, which offers the promise of bringing simple mail and calendar functions to wireless devices. The product race is on to extend Web capabilities to non-PC devices, and this server is one of the first to deal with the thorny issue of reformatting Web information on the fly for tiny-screen, portable devices.

The GoBizGo.com business from Net Objects is a fresh approach to welcoming small, local businesses onto the Web. Rather than confuse small businesses with offers of free megabytes of disk space (who cares?), the service is designed to give you the expertise, tools and community features you need to get a business on the Web in about 10 minutes.