Everywhere we look, the once-limitless promise of the Internet appears to be fading. The dot-coms that were supposed to topple industry giants have mostly vanished. The last of the Net’s bluest-chips are on the ropes. No 1 e-tailer Amazon.com can’t extract a profit from its $2.8 billion in sales, leading some to predict it will run out of money. And in early March, one of the few profitable web companies, portal Yahoo!, said it would badly miss sales projections for the first quarter.

Internet stocks are in free fall, many of them lucky to top a buck a share—sending billions of dollars of investment up in smoke.

And the collapse isn’t stopping at the dot-coms, as the once-untouchable makers of the networking and computer gear that serve as the Internet’s foundation are also on the run. In March Cisco Systems jolted the market with its second warning of slower growth to come, announcing its first-ever widespread layoffs. That followed a warning of slowing sales in late February from Sun Microsystems, whose servers run countless web sites.

Now, the mounting woes of the Internet sector seem to be spreading to the rest of the economy. Just as the rollout of the Internet helped fuel the boom of the 1990s, the evaporation of Net euphoria is helping drag down consumer confidence and corporate capital spending, not to mention the stock market. Since the beginning of the year, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is down 12%, and the US economy looks ready to slide into its first tech-triggered recession.

But look beyond the current economic and market plight, and a different picture emerges. As with any new technology, the early years of the Net have been a learning process—and here’s what we now know. First, the Internet was supposed to change everything. That’s just plain wrong. The reality is, there was no way that a single technology could fulfill such an extravagant promise.

Instead, it turns out that the transformative power of the Net is being felt unevenly. There are plenty of industries and situations where the Net has the potential to be revolutionary, as its most enthusiastic backers had predicted, and their number will only widen as new technologies such as broadband come into widespread use. But clearly in much of the economy, the Internet offers incremental payoffs without substantially altering core businesses. Even in industries where the Net can effect profound change, institutional barriers and business inertia mean the big gains may not come for years.

Strip away the highfalutin talk, and at bottom, the Internet is a tool that dramatically lowers the cost of communication. It  can radically alter any industry or activity that depends heavily on the flow of information. In areas such as financial services, the process is well under way. In other information-intensive industries, such as entertainment, health care, government, and education, the potential lies in the future. But it’s there.

The Net can not only dramatically reduce the cost of both consumer and business transactions, but also improve coordination, both within and across companies, while giving them direct contact with consumers. "The reality is that e-business is a tremendous tool for cost reduction, to help you get closer to your customer and for what used to be called Old Economy companies to apply to our current processes," says Brian Kelley, vice-president of global consumer services at Ford Motor and the architect of most of the auto maker’s e-business initiatives.

Over the coming decade, the biggest gains will come from restructuring the way work is done within companies. The Net can become the communications backbone for everything from linking supply chains for speedy product turnarounds to storing employee expertise so that co-workers can tap into ready-made knowledge instead of starting from scratch.

Given the crucial role of communication and information, the long-term impact on economic growth could be substantial. The Internet could add up to 0.4 percentage points to annual productivity growth over the next five years, according to new research from the Brookings Institution. And this estimate doesn’t take into account the further gains that would come should broadband be affordably piped into every home, making interaction with the Internet far richer.

If applied right, ultimately, the Internet could boost the rate of innovation by increasing the speed at which ideas spread between companies, within economies, and across countries.