Multimedia and the information superhighway are terms used so broadly that they have come to mean absolutely everything and, as a result, are beginning to mean virtually nothing. This is unfortunate. Interactive multimedia technologies are leading to a fundamental shift in the economics and competitive dynamics of entire industries.

Despite great uncertainty about outcomes, the senior managers of many companies need to make choices—often "bet the company" choices—about opportunities for value creation and, even more frequently, about the threat of large-scale value destruction. There is great temptation to delay these decisions in the hope that more information will make them clearer. But the failure to make them—now—is itself perhaps the highest risk decision of all.

To make these choices intelligently, senior managers need to understand the unfamiliar, highly complex, and rapidly-changing landscape being shaped by multimedia technologies. A knowledge of this landscape can be helpful in identifying how the boundaries of the key competitive arenas or "battlegrounds" in multimedia are evolving. It can help frame the strategic decisions that different types of businesses are going to have to make. It can suggest the likely timing and potential impact of those...