Bowman has now exiled himself to Siberia, er, make that Cyberia, as in Cyberian Outpost Inc., the small Internet company where he became chief executive in September. (Bowman owns 200,000 shares of Cyberian Outpost.) Cyberian Outpost operates Outpost.com, an online retailer of computers and other technology products. Bowman, 44, spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Keith Naughton about his old job, his new one and whether his kids should even bother going to college:

NAUGHTON: Did the Net even show up on your radar screen at ITT? BOWMAN: I got the Internet bug when Paul Allen, another sloucher who’s probably worth only $40 billion or $50 billion, owned a big slug of AOL back in 1994 and decided to sell. I desperately wanted to buy it. I was convinced that commerce was going to move to the Internet. We made a pitch to AOL, but when push came to shove, ultimately the [ITT] board didn’t go through with it.

With the millions you made from ITT, you don’t have to work. Why bother? For the same reason that if I’m walking along a playground and I see a pickup game of touch football, I won’t walk by. I’m going to linger until somebody finally asks me to play. It’s the thrill of the competition. And there really is no playbook.

Do you worry that all your hard-earned money from ITT could go up in smoke? Sure. But you can’t play in the arena unless you’ve got your own skin in the game.

How big is your bet on the Internet? I’ve got 20 percent of my net worth in the Internet. If all the 20 percent goes up in smoke, the hit to my dignity and reputation would bother me a lot more than my hit to the wallet. But my eyes are wide open. This is not a Stanley Kubrick film.

Why did you go to Outpost.com? One reason is that this is the fifth holiday season they have been selling online. They are old. Right after Al Gore invented the Internet, these people were selling on it.

Are you going to tell your kids to go to Harvard and get their Wharton M.B.A. like you did? Or should they just jump into the dot-com gold rush? My wife tells me I can’t say they have to go to college, but I’m going to suggest very heavily that they go to college. This gold rush of ‘99 has about eight months to run. With the Internet, we’re only in the first inning of an extra-innings ball game. As people realize this isn’t going to be over in a year, they’ll start going back to business school.

What can Old Economy companies do to keep people like you from defecting to dot-com? There are still legions of talented people in traditional business. What we have now is reminiscent of other seismic shifts in the economy, like the industrialization of America at the turn of the century. Back then, the sexy new companies like automobile manufacturers got what seemed like all the talent because the best and brightest wanted to be on that cutting edge. But they didn’t get everyone.

Will you ever go back to the offline world? You never say never, but it’s hard to imagine right now. This is very invigorating.