(FORTUNE Magazine) – It was billed as an e-commerce boot camp--a two-day immersion in the lessons of the New Economy. About 50 people attended the event, which was held in San Francisco in late February and was organized by the Round Table Group, a Chicago consulting firm. My assignment: Learn everything I could about e-business in two days, or die trying.

The campers ranged from aspiring Web entrepreneurs like David Newman, the frenetic CEO of Cyberworld, who kept waving his arms and shouting things like "I see the Internet as a giant direct-marketing gig!" to teams of buttoned-down middle managers from FORTUNE 500 companies, including one uptight pair from Kraft Foods who wouldn't talk to me without permission from headquarters (permission was denied). Average age: maybe 35 or 40, meaning these were people who had begun their careers during the Great Before. Now they were playing catch-up.

Our drill sergeants were lawyers from Baker & McKenzie, consultants from Andersen Consulting, and professors from Berkeley, Stanford, Northwestern, New York University, and Yale. No, they didn't make us do pushups or run an obstacle course.

But it was brutal in its own way. They put us in a dimly lit ballroom at San Francisco's Sir Francis Drake Hotel; ordered trays of muffins and pitchers of fruit smoothies; made us turn off the ringers on our cell phones; and then pounded away from dawn until dark on arcane topics like "The Economics of Information," "Legal Consultation for e-Ventures," and "Game Theory, Complements, and Bundling."

Brian Johnson, an Andersen partner, set the tone the first morning when he introduced his "escape velocity" metaphor for launching a successful e-venture. "The bigger the object you're escaping from, the more speed you need," Johnson said. "The bigger you are, the more fuel you need." Failure to meet either requirement, he warned, means "you'll crash and burn."

That put a damper on lunch, where the nervous chatter among the corporate set was about channel conflicts, obsessions with profits, and other factors inhibiting the development of a real e-culture at their firms. Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah, an attendee from McKinsey, voiced the anguish of the middle manager. "All the best people are leaving [to go to dot-coms]," he told me, "and you're left behind. And you still have to deal with the problem."

After listening to lawyers all afternoon (they'd managed to convince us, as lawyers will, that Internet law is hopelessly complicated and that the only answer is to hire lots of lawyers), finally it was time for cocktails. I found myself talking to Seth Horowitz, a 43-year-old former wire and cable salesman who may have discovered the last corner of industrial America not yet served by a B2B Internet hub. While Seth was attending boot camp, a team of MBA students back in Chicago was putting the finishing touches on his business plan for thewireexchange.com. "The future is here," he confided knowingly. "This is it."

On Friday we learned that the outlook for sellers is far from bleak--despite the fact that the Web gives buyers unprecedented power to compare prices and squeeze profit margins. Savvy retailers can use intricate new tools to their advantage--by tailoring highly personalized products, for example, and using precision pricing for different market segments. "It's an arms race," said Yannis Bakos, a professor at NYU's Stern School, "and sellers can buy bigger guns. It's not clear who will win."

Wrapping things up was professor Mohan Sawhney, the e-commerce guru at Northwestern's Kellogg School. He compared venture capitalists to teenaged girls--"once one has a certain kind of handbag, they all have to have one"--and discussed the succession of e-business fads, from portals, to B2C, to B2B. The fads can collapse without warning, he noted, leaving small investors out in the cold. We saw what happened last fall to all those B2C stocks; B2B's demise, Sawhney believes, is just around the corner. "Please do not start a plain-vanilla B2B market maker today," he pleaded. "Party's over." (Horowitz, sitting in the front row, stared ahead stonily.)

Sawhney sent us on our way with a grand vision of a wired future. "We may be seeing the evolution of one giant brain called the Internet," he said, "which is intelligence on demand, reconfigurable, and possibly evolving into higher forms that we don't yet understand."

The meaning of all this didn't come into perspective until the next day, after I had returned to my home in Boston. As fate would have it, I was attending a (virtual) speech by Amazon.com's CEO, Jeff Bezos, at the Harvard Business School. Despite the fact that his wife was expecting the couple's first child at any moment, Bezos had managed to get himself to a Seattle television studio at 5 A.M. on a Saturday. And so, via satellite, he spoke for nearly an hour, charming everyone. What struck me most, given what I'd just been through, were his Seven Myths of the Internet Economy--especially Myth No. 1, "The Internet changes everything," and Myth No. 7, "Everybody needs an Internet strategy." His point: Not necessarily. Which sounded to me as if Bezos, of all people--inventor of the original Internet strategy, changer of everything--was saying maybe we should take a chill pill.

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