>The demonstration, powered by technology created by >Echelon, a maker of interoperable
>control networks, boosted shares of Echelon."
>Interesting coincidence, or were you also at the show?
Coincidence.
I made a couple of misstatements in my post that need repair: Clearly I had .com on the mind when I referred to Broadcom as Broadcom.com.
More important, I can be faulted for suggesting that e-Commerce per se differentiates between the current stock of inflated Internet companies and new and existing companies that will focused more on Internet Appliances. What will be the use of Internet Appliances if not e-Commerce? This is like saying that the second, PC Paradigm wave of computing involves complex computational algorithms; whereas the third, ubiquitous hidden computing wave does not. Nonsense.
What does differentiate the looming business of Internet Appliances from the thrust of most current Internet companies? The answer parallels the differences between the PC Paradigm and the Ubiquitous Hidden Computing Paradigm. Most e-Commerce occurring today is a result of a user interfacing with an e-tailing facility by means of a PC. The goal of Microsoft and most portal services on the Internet is to make e-Commerce a seamless extension of ordinary PC operation. Stated differently, most current e-Commerce is simply another PC application.
The primary characteristic of e-Commerce that will occur on Internet Appliances is special purpose, either non-interactive with humans or simple in form, and ubiquitous. Rather than computer-literate humans struggling one-on-one with a general-purpose PC, e-Commerce will be performed in behalf of networked people by a myriad of Internet Appliances, whether or not the people are computer literate.
Most future appliances in networked homes, offices and automobiles will be monitored, diagnosed, kept repaired through software fixes or response visits by the repairman, insured, and made secure through anticipated uses of Internet Appliances. Many aspects such as health, location, communication, and paging-type alarms of unlimited variety will be provided using Internet Appliances. And none of this will involve the need for computer literacy, or even the ownership of a PC – although virtually all of it will be e-Commerce.
Notice the phrase, “networked people”. Some individuals and even some countries might decline to participate in this form of e-Commerce. That's everybody's right, and perhaps every government's right, but the costs of not participating will be ever-increasing – by most measures. Networked people statistically will be richer, healthier, more secure and have more free time than non-networked people.
Some pundits treat these primary forms of e-Commerce as generational. The predominant form of e-Commerce occurring today is referred to as first-generation e-Commerce, while Internet Appliance e-Commerce naturally is second generation.
This is a mnemonic device for properly categorizing these relations:
The second wave of computing enables the first generation of e-Commerce. The third wave of computing enables the second generation of e-Commerce.
Just as the breath and importance of successive waves of computing paradigms increases geometrically, so will successive waves of e-Commerce. It should be understood the forecast for Internet Appliances is about as reliable as a 1995 forecast of the number of Internet users in 1998. Any forecast of Internet Appliances likely will be aggressive until the technology takes off, after which it will be embarrassingly conservative.
Allen |
