So I talked not only to the Lilienfelds but to Larry Grant, the legendary florist himself. Many in the media were still enchanted with the Electronic Frontier metaphor, and I remembered the old films about Davy Crockett, the Tennessee frontiersman who loved corny jokes, bear-wrestling tales, coonskin hats, and Crockett-friendly news accounts—the grist for Walt Disney later on. What was next, a movie epic with a musical tribute to “Larry Grant, king of the Net frontier”? A market might indeed be ballooning for cyber-retailers, as the hypesters said. But I still wondered about the present. What counted was not all the puffery about 30 million Netfolks, many of whom can only read electronic mail as opposed to _seeing_ roses or toy tops or other merchandise. No, the real determinant was how often people dial up your particular site and bought. One well-crafted Web area, which advertised technically related goods, enjoyed just a handful of visits in six months without a single sale. This was an issue aside from the total amount of business done on the Net. Having talked with Mary Cronin and others, I hadn’t any doubt about those giant commodity transactions and all the use of the Net by Big Business to automate the paperwork of commerce. But what about the small fry? Was the excitement about Grant truly justified? I’ll answer those questions in the pages ahead, where I’ll return to the Lilienfelds and to Grant, and where I’ll examine the following: • MCI, the phone company. It has provided thousands of miles of Net connections and now rents out electronic storefronts on the Net. MCI offers one of the slickest Web areas—complete with a fictitious publishing house (now evolving into a real one) that accepts manuscripts from real readers. _Advertising Age_ has hailed the MCI site as “unquestionably the best Internet marketing effort to date.” Frustratingly, however, while preparing to dispense advice on cyberspace, MCI in early 1995 was committing some of the very mistakes it should be telling its customers to avoid. • Federal Express, whose Internet presence shows the potential of the Net for business-to-business transactions, not just the consumer variety. Ironically the people at FedEx in some ways were demonstrating more Net savvy than MCI was at the time, even though the Internet was more in the territory of the latter. The old values of customer service still reigned above all else. A smaller competitor of Federal Express, a shipper called Right-O-Way, was also making outstanding use of the Net. In some ways it was even staying ahead of the big boys. • Intel, the chipmaker, which learned the hard way how good the Internet was for spreading news of flaws in products. The Net abounds with skeptical academics and consumerists with _fast_ typing fingers.