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Pastimes : The Justa & Lars Honors Bob Brinker Investment Club -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Demosthenes who wrote (9452)	10/25/1999 9:18:00 AM
From: Allan Harris	Respond to of 15132

Beyond The Information Revolution The author uses history to gauge the significance of e-commerce -- "a totally unexpected development" -- and to throw light on the future of "the knowledge worker," his own coinage by Peter F. Drucker Full article: theatlantic.com Excerpt: Twenty-five years ago it was generally believed that within a few decades the printed word would be dispatched electronically to individual subscribers' computer screens. Subscribers would then either read text on their computer screens or download it and print it out. This was the assumption that underlay the CD-ROM. Thus any number of newspapers and magazines, by no means only in the United States, established themselves online; few, so far, have become gold mines. But anyone who twenty years ago predicted the business of Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com -- that is, that books would be sold on the Internet but delivered in their heavy, printed form -- would have been laughed off the podium. Yet Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com are in exactly that business, and they are in it worldwide. The first order for the U.S. edition of my most recent book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999), came to Amazon.com, and it came from Argentina. Another example: Ten years ago one of the world's leading automobile companies made a thorough study of the expected impact on automobile sales of the then emerging Internet. It concluded that the Internet would become a major distribution channel for used cars, but that customers would still want to see new cars, to touch them, to test-drive them. In actuality, at least so far, most used cars are still being bought not over the Internet but in a dealer's lot. However, as many as half of all new cars sold (excluding luxury cars) may now actually be "bought" over the Internet. Dealers only deliver cars that customers have chosen well before they enter the dealership. What does this mean for the future of the local automobile dealership, the twentieth century's most profitable small business? Another example: Traders in the American stock-market boom of 1998 and 1999 increasingly buy and sell online. But investors seem to be shifting away from buying electronically. The major U.S. investment vehicle is mutual funds. And whereas almost half of all mutual funds a few years ago were bought electronically, it is estimated that the figure will drop to 35 percent next year and to 20 percent by 2005. This is the opposite of what "everybody expected" ten or fifteen years ago. The fastest-growing e-commerce in the United States is in an area where there was no "commerce" until now -- in jobs for professionals and managers. Almost half of the world's largest companies now recruit through Web sites, and some two and a half million managerial and professional people (two thirds of them not even engineers or computer professionals) have their r‚sum‚s on the Internet and solicit job offers over it. The result is a completely new labor market. This illustrates another important effect of e-commerce. New distribution channels change who the customers are. They change not only how customers buy but also what they buy. They change consumer behavior, savings patterns, industry structure -- in short, the entire economy. This is what is now happening, and not only in the United States but increasingly in the rest of the developed world, and in a good many emerging countries, including mainland China.