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To: chirodoc who wrote (1155)	10/28/1999 10:57:00 PM
From: bobgh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1412

---Good Article--- Thursday October 28, 10:25 pm Eastern Time Internet now on center stage for big U.S. corporations By Michael Connor BOCA RATON, Fla., Oct 28, (Reuters) - Blue-chip companies can no longer ignore the Internet, which is fast becoming an essential tool of doing business and keeping prices in check while boosting productivity, top corporate executives say. Far from a novelty, the Internet was the main topic of a meeting in Boca Raton of the Business Council, an organization of hundreds of chief executives from the biggest U.S. corporations and was credited by many of the executives as an important marketing, purchasing and operational counter to rising wages and weak pricing power. ``The defensiveness that might have been there a year ago is gone,' Larry Bossidy, chief executive of diversified manufacturer AlliedSignal Inc., said during a news conference on Wednesday. ``You have to be there.' Dow Chemical Co. chief executive William Stavropoulos said in an interview on Thursday that the new uses of the Internet, along with re-engineering of work processes and heavy spending to develop innovative products helped the second-largest U.S. chemical maker handle dropping prices for many of its chemicals. ``The Internet is really changing the way people deal with financial institutions,' said Chairman Sanford Weill of Citigroup, the world's leading financial-services group with operations in 100 countries. Eastman Kodak Chairman George Fisher said a key marketing campaign for the photography group was ``You've Got Pictures', a venture with Internet-service America Online Inc. (NYSE:AOL - news) that provides digitized copies of snapshots for e-mail and other computer uses, along with traditional prints. Kodak expects the service to stimulate demand for film and specialized papers for printing images from computers. ``We make a lot of money in consumables,' Fisher said in an interview. The chief executive of health care group Johnson & Johnson, Ralph Larsen, said the Internet was a main avenue for delivering medical and pharmaceutical information to consumers, doctors, nurses and other health care workers. Inquiries about matters such as side effects of drugs and correct treatments for ailments seem endless, he said. Bossidy said the buzz about the sale of books, flowers and clothes on the Internet was hiding the more important and more advanced business-to-business electronic commerce dealings. Many suppliers and customers were cooperating closely through the Internet, he said. ``You can expect to see a lot of business-to-business breakthroughs, not in the next five years, in the next year,' Bossidy said. Don Davis, chairman of Rockwell International, said the maker of automatic controls for use in an array of industries, was ready to delve into business-to-business sales over the Internet next month. ``The obvious place to for us to start is on our software products because (customers) can download the information immediately,' Davis said in an interview. ``We'll go from there into a broader range of products.' The executives echoed the thinking of U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was scheduled to speak to the Business Council on Thursday evening. Greenspan has given credence to the notion that new technology has rendered the economy more efficient and less prone to inflation, while cautioning that acceleration in productivity was not limitless. But for business the immediate productivity benefits from the Internet are clear, according to Larsen. ``Any company that is not turning itself inside out ... has to be on a different planet,' Larsen said. biz.yahoo.com