NET COULD OVERSHADOW TV.

Byline: Yardena Arar Daily News Staff Writer

With the World Wide Web doubling in size every 45 days and more and more computers flooding into homes, the Internet eventually will outdraw TV, digital guru Nicholas Negroponte told a group of California executives.

``I believe that in the year 2000, more people will be on the Internet than looking at broadcast television,'' Negroponte said. ``And if I'm wrong, it'll only be by a few months.''

Negroponte, founding director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, senior columnist and a backer of Wired magazine and author of ``Being Digital,'' warned the 250 people at a Pacific Bell Executive Forum in Beverly Hills last week that on the Internet, bigger isn't necessarily better - or more commercially successful.

He cited as an example a couscous recipe site created by two housewives in the Moroccan city of Fez, which competes with the couscous recipes in Time Warner's slick international cookbooks.

``Now, Gerry Levin (Time Warner's CEO) doesn't lose sleep over housewives in Fez,'' Negroponte said. ``But what he doesn't realize is that there are maybe thousands of Fezes out there.''

Negroponte said corporations will have to adjust to the differences between the digital future and the present.

Noting that the young and the old make up the biggest percentage of Internet users, Negroponte warned corporate management against remaining part of the ``digital homeless.''

But a show-of-hands poll by another speaker, Pacific Telesis Enterprises President and Chief Executive Michael Fitzpatrick, suggested that the majority of managers in the room were already on line. Far more people indicated they had sent e-mail in the previous day than had mailed a conventional letter in the previous week.

``E-mail has now replaced post office mail,'' Fitzpatrick said, noting that last year, 95 billion pieces of e-mail were sent, compared to 85 million pieces of post office mail, or ``snail mail.''

Fitzpatrick demonstrated Pacific Telesis' new Personal Communication Service digital phone, which is two-thirds the size of a conventional cellular phone and can be used as a pager or to send encrypted data to ``smart cards,'' which are expected to come into use as a medium for digital money.

Fitzpatrick had two major pieces of advice for companies preparing to conduct business on the Internet. The first was to hire a good Web master, and the second was not to fear technology.

``Welcome it - and do whatever you can to adapt your business to the digital world.''