(FORTUNE Magazine) – Information technology has created more wealth faster than anything ever. The market value of Yahoo, just three years public, has grown from $34 million to $27 billion--more than the entire U.S. steel industry is worth. An Internet bubble, some might say--and might be right; but surely Microsoft's no bubble, and it's worth more than General Motors, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler combined.

Technology has also created great opportunity. Each day 20 new U.S. technology and telecom companies are born. Some 1.2 million of the best jobs on the planet are held by Americans in the software and computer-services industries. Other benefits are harder to quantify but no less real: the chance to buy any book in print, no matter how far you live from a decent bookstore; to fix a memo without retyping the whole damn thing; to leave phone messages when no one's home or call when you're stuck in traffic; to send mail around the world in seconds, not weeks; to see Casablanca every time you must.

Now the Internet--like telephones and televisions--is transforming society and markets. This has sparked debate about people who might be left behind. In studies called Falling Through the Net, the Commerce Department presented 1994 and 1997 data that described a nation divided between information haves (white, prosperous, educated) and have-nots. For example, half the households with incomes of $75,000 or more had online service in 1997, vs. just 14% of those earning $25,000 to $35,000. There is a "digital divide" and a "digital apartheid," and--catchy phrases aside--a legitimate concern that it is wrong, even dangerous, if the wealth, work, and worthwhile things created by technology benefit only a few and leave the rest eating digital dust.

Rich people do get wired first, but that by itself is neither surprising nor worrisome. The rich owned horses while the poor walked, drove cars while others rode trams, watched color TV while others listened to AM radio. Some technologies (Learjets, yachts) never spread beyond a few wealthy people, and no one cares.

The relevant questions are these:

How fast is the Internet spreading? Very. When this year's kindergartners were born, only the weird were wired. By December 1998, 61 million adult Americans were using the Internet, 50% more than did so 12 months earlier.

How deeply is it penetrating society? Also very. The Net shows signs of becoming as all-American as phones, TVs, and cars. The personal computer is less than 17 years old, yet 48% of U.S. households have at least one; 68% of American children live in a house with a PC. The number of schools with Internet connections zoomed from 65% in 1996 to 85% in 1998.

And the technology have-nots? The news--and it is news--is that their number is shrinking with stunning speed. The online gender gap is almost entirely gone. The age gap is narrowing; nearly a third of the membership of the American Association of Retired People owns a PC, and the number of wired fogies will steadily grow as death takes the oldest, who retired before the PC was born. The wage and race gaps are closing too. About 54% of Net veterans (online more than a year) earn more than $50,000 a year, according to a survey last November by the Pew Research Center; but 57% of newbies, online less than a year, earn under $50,000. Moore's Law is the poor's friend: As long as the cost of a given amount of processing power falls 50% every 18 months, fewer and fewer people will be unable to afford to compute.

One gap still yawns, that between the U.S. and the rest of the world. No other people have taken up the toys and tools of the Information Age as Americans have. The U.S. is also far and away the most wired big country. No. 3 in population, the U.S. has more phone lines and PCs than China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Japan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria--the others in the big ten--combined. By global standards, nearly every American is an information Croesus.

Where will it stop? That's the 56-kilobits-per-second question. To achieve universal telephone service took an act of Congress--the Communications Act of 1934. No such help was needed with radios or television. At the start of the Clinton Administration, many thought the government should spend billions for a national information infrastructure; the private sector didn't wait. Later Newt Gingrich proposed that governments buy PCs for students; now they cost about the same as TV sets. The Net's hell-bent growth will plateau, but where? It could be as low as 67% (the percentage of households with cable TV); it could be as high as 95% (the percentage with telephones). Today, according to Forrester Research, 38% of households have Net access.

Someday people without Net access may be isolated or disadvantaged in a big way. The Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960 mark a point at which anyone without TV was less than fully able to participate in the nation's life. The Net's not there yet. About the only things you can't do other than online are apply to MIT and listen to Steve Forbes announce his presidential rerun. If the advantages of being wired significantly outstrip the growth of the Netizenry, governments may need to help the last have-nots across the digital divide.

Why is this a management issue? Three reasons. First, for the CEO of Rip Van Winkle Enterprises: You have no choice. A plumber who is not online is on his way down the drain. In 1992 a friend told me that she found e-mail so compelling that she was starting to lose contact with friends without it. If you do not understand that, you are already losing suppliers, customers, and job candidates.

Second: Stop thinking of electronic commerce as a niche market. Sure, the money's small--today. E*Trade is a pimple on Merrill Lynch's nose--today. But just months after Merrill's executives derided Internet brokerage, they embraced it. If 61 million is a niche market, the Hall of Mirrors is a powder room.

Third: The medium is the message. The online population is demographically "normal," but that doesn't mean it's like mass markets of yore. Though human nature doesn't change, different media bring out different aspects of it. Television, Marshall McLuhan said, is a "cool" medium--that is, unintense. The Web is "kewl." It is intense. It is different. A while back (April) one of my colleagues wrote: "The Internet is not about creating ways to link people and ideas. It's all about marketing." FORTUNE is never wrong, so that was correct at the time. But times have changed.

Up on the Web (www.cluetrain.com) is a polite, in-your-face document called The Cluetrain Manifesto. The work of four longtime Web denizens, it's the subject of talk even in establishment places like the Conference Board. Some excerpts:

"Markets are getting smarter--and getting smarter faster than most companies.... People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.... The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone....

"Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations.... In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business--the sound of mission statements and brochures--will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th-century French court.... Companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone."

Can we talk?