That's rarely the plan, of course: from Gutenberg to Marc Andreessen, most innovators don't set out to change the world -- not at the start, anyway. They just want to do something faster, cheaper or better. But real innovations trigger the law of unintended consequences. And that, in turn, sets off waves of what economist Joseph Schumpeter four decades ago called ''creative destruction,'' the ability to transform everything they touch. Welcome to the revolution.

The Internet first saw light as just such a modest quest, even if it was the United States Department of Defense, looking for a better way to keep in touch with itself during a nuclear holocaust. But 30 years later, what started as elite, secret, scientific research has matured into a transformative vortex, spinning out one surprise after another. Just as Schumpeter predicted, there is a pattern: the transformation builds slowly, invisibly, and then bursts into the open, literally overnight. And from Main Street to Bill Gates' boardroom, that is precisely what is happening now.

The word "commerce," an anathema on the Net for decades, is ringing through Cyberspace now with the same overpowering force. At first it was bit players only: quirky bookstores like Future Fantasy, hyperactive personal-injury lawyers and, for some odd reason, a large contingent of salsa retailers. All of three long years ago, for those pioneers faster-cheaper-better translated to instant, virtually free access to small numbers of obsessed customers spread across large geographies, willing to brave the early Web's sheer ugly complexity.

Then the big players began piling in. Joe Boxer and Bank of America added Web addresses to their billboards. Nervous newspapers began two-way publishing. Banks and stockbrokers started building conduits for electronic money. And consumer product companies from Adidas to Zima hurriedly threw together online (or maybe interactive) marketing units, scratching their collective heads over how to use this uniquely interpersonal medium for mass-market combat.

But to look at the Net in business terms as just another new tool misses the point: the historic shift it is fostering from marketplace to marketspace. The physical "place" of stores, banks and shopping malls won't disappear. What will happen is happening already. We will continue to see the growth of a larger, more metaphysical "space," comprised of both existing physical places and emerging electronic spaces. Online warehouses. Virtual reality malls. Financial services will become more product-like. You will be able to put a home-equity loan in your supermarket shopping cart even as markets for ordinary goods become as fluid as financial markets.

There is a temptation to equate "better, cheaper, faster" with the elimination of middlemen; we see consumers and producers dealing directly with each other. But don't count on it. The goal in business is not efficiency per se, but effectiveness. And intermediaries can be powerful tools, especially with new technologies relentlessly driving down costs. Just look at the gaggle of "electronic cash" companies building business around the possibility of profitably collecting "microcash" in transactions too small to be managed by traditional banking and credit-card conduits. It might cost five cents to read an article or 10 cents to look at a picture. It could cost 25 cents to listen to the latest number-one song on the charts in Tokyo.

Traditional middlemen are indeed being displaced, but value chains aren't shortening. New middle players are emerging in a process of "disinter-remediation" that will end up with more intermediaries than ever. (Look no further than the ruthlessly competitive online mail-order companies selling -- surprise -- computer equipment and software.) But as the Net grows, that in turn will give way to a "value Web," a kind of electronic soul, with an infinite number of paths between potential buyer and seller. And what all this hints at is an even larger scale change; a shift in the very underpinnings of modern economics from traditional mechanistic models to something best understood as an ecology based on biological principles.