To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (122406 ) 4/3/2001 1:01:02 AM From: Glenn D. Rudolph Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 164684 gdr, no argument here. however, your profits can translate into less dollars for someone else in this country. on a macro basis, it can be a wash. if so, your increased profits should not be reported in gdp. i';m not arguing that computers have not made america more unit productive. they have. i'm arguing they didn't make america that much more economically (how efficiently we create dollars) productive above normal standards. info tech has helped, it just isn't the economic shangri la it has been portrayed to be. there is no new economy. SB, You are correct. The efficiency I was able to produce within my firm came at the cost of profits other media/advertising firms, etc. It is not found money. I likely was only able to do thai due to my personal interest in the use of technology for my business. That is not the norm. I am far from saying I know close to everything. Far from that. The fact I can create professional print advertising in house, a relational database for a small firm, direct marketing tools for much les than a print shot, etc. strictly comes from a desire to operate in this manner. We end up doing direct mail using Car Route Sort not typically done by small firms. We are capapble of just in time inventory for some products providing discounts to us be less margin to vendors and we take customers from competitors because we know what they prefer, when their anniversary may be, when their children's birthday's are etc. That business comes at the expense of a competitor and does not increase GDP or total sales for the industry at all. By the way, just to keep people up to day, I sold all my Ariba today at a huge loss. Were not those the people that were going to make B2B more efficient? GST, Please don't rub it in ok? <G> I am already a bit down about the issue. Hey I am still holding ISLD;-)