While we are sitting around chatting about the Wave of the Future, it has already washed up onto the shore, left a heap of sand on the beach, and gone back out to sea.

Restricted to a one-way street on our plane of existence, we are very much a future-centric species, we humans. The present is either spent planning or conjecturing about the future or ruminating about the past (mostly with an eye to assess the future).

As a result, when someone talks to me about something new, I know full well that that the “new” thing belongs to yesterday and the next big thing is being cooked up in a lab, a poet’s pen, or a scientific brain. This is our essential paradox.

E-commerce has been around for a very long time. I remember watching my high school friend sitting in front of a massive looking computer back in…