(FORTUNE Magazine) – Who cares how many taps of a pen or clicks of a jog dial it takes to get a phone number on a PDA? Who cares whether a Website's shopping basket clearly confirms a purchase? Who cares whether a modem gets a 28K or a 56K connection?

Once you've watched airplanes fly into a pair of buildings, and once you've watched those buildings collapse with thousands of people inside, who cares about information technology? That's a question I've been asking myself a lot since Sept. 11, especially when I sit down to write a column. It was not a question I was concerned with on Aug. 1, when my wife, Charlotte, and I flew to Aspen, Colo., for FORTUNE's Brainstorm 2001 conference.

I sure wish we could rerun that conference now. I would love to hear how that amazing collection of people believe our world has been changed by bin Laden's agents. Left to my own devices, I've decided that information technology matters just as much as it did before Sept. 11. I've decided to focus more than ever on the most crucial issues facing the IT industry, like these:

--How will we continue to finance the global deployment of broadband?

The overconfidence of the past few years made it a breeze to raise the money to build a great number of high-performance, high-capacity data networks in the developed world. But now that the bubble has burst, it's clear that we didn't finish building a global network. There's a solid core infrastructure both nationally and internationally, very good intercity connections, and pretty good service in big cities. But the infrastructure in schools and other nonprofit public services is still a mess; many small cities and rural areas aren't well connected; and the wireless public-access network that was beginning to emerge has stalled.

More important, we don't have a clear way to finance much needed improvements. There's a vague notion that the "incumbents"--the former telecom monopolies in the U.S. and overseas--still have money to develop the infrastructure. But there is little competitive threat motivating them to spend.

--How can we make the computer industry truly competitive and therefore continually innovative?

Regardless of any fine print around the settlement of the U.S. government's antitrust suit against Microsoft, Windows remains the standard for personal computing. PDAs, cellular phones, game consoles, interactive set-top boxes, etc., offer other ways to connect with the Internet, but Microsoft aims to become a major player in all those alternative categories as well.

I can already feel an innovation slowdown in personal computing. You can just sense the sad sigh of programmers: "What's the point of innovating, after all, when you know that the end game involves competing with that company? You can't win." Triumph over all the risks in starting a new company--technical, market, management, and financial--and you still find yourself facing Microsoft.

--How can we make all this stuff--hardware, software, networks--truly usable by mere mortals?

That problem has faced the industry since the first computing machine was sold more than 50 years ago. The more we depend on the stuff, the more we feel the problem. The issue is integration: between hardware and software, between different pieces of software, between devices and networks, and between networks. One of the most fundamental notions in computing is the idea of "application programming interfaces," or APIs. APIs represent an attempt to resolve the incompatibility between two different computing entities. But they also inevitably engender political battles about who gets to decide which interface matters more. And the industry has no effective political infrastructure for settling such issues.

So these are the three big issues facing information technology, issues that persist between business cycles. What is not nearly so important is whether tech stocks go up or down. A downturn in the stock market has knocked the industry down. But infotech will come back, and when it does, these are the issues that we will still be wrestling with. Which is why I'm going to focus on them more than ever. Life goes on. Improving our productivity, using technology to make more of each day--these things will begin to feel important again. At a time when our basic idea of security and our basic conception of man's inhumanity have changed fundamentally, it helps me to know that sometime soon my work will again start to feel meaningful.

STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as noted, neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. He can be reached at alsop_infotech@fortunemail.com. His column may be bookmarked online at www.fortune.com/technology/alsop.