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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gnuman who wrote (53565)	3/28/1999 9:37:00 PM
From: A. A. LaFountain III	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1584598

Gene Parrott: Re "apparent dichotomy" I'm not sure why this question is posed to me as opposed to the thread in general, but that doesn't reduce the relevance of the question. First, I think that it's important to recognize the business-to-business aspect of e-commerce, and that it's not just about getting people to use L. L. Bean's website to replace its 800 number. With that in mind, it's possible to view the e-commerce as the replacement for internal MIS when companies increasingly splinter and outsource what had been internal operations. Second, as mentioned in an interesting letter to the editor in The Atlantic Monthly, what is being described as productivity gains in the business sector is often the result of work being shifted to the consumer/user (e.g., ATMs, self-service gas stations, companies tracking their own FedEx shipments, etc.). If, as it appears, we are facing labor shortages for the foreseeable future, businesses are very likely to offer substantial incentives to their customers to perform some of these tasks. Given enough incentive, early adopters will continue to increase their usage of e-commerce type activities to the point where e-commerce becomes more mainstream. I'm not sure if a two order of magnitude increase in four years is hype or hope. My guess (and it's just that) is that like so many other revolutionary processes/products, e-commerce will grow real big eventually, but that its growth path will pretty much defy accurate prediction. Eleven years ago, I left Wall Street and started up an online-information service - a bulletin board for investor relations and corporate PR. At that time, 300 baud modems were the norm. As part of the service, I was going to produce CD-ROMs for free distribution to the top 1000 money management companies in the US to offload the more archival information from the bulletin board. To set this up, I went to Sony's Digital Audio Disc Corporation in Terre Haute, IN to investigate CD-ROM production. When I met with the marketing manager, he asked me how many CD-ROMs I would be interested in having made. I explained my concept to him and said that I would try to sell some in addition to those that I distributed for free, so that I'd probably take about 2,000 every quarter. He told me that 8,000 CD-ROMs a year would make my operation one of their top ten customers. I think about that every time I hear of really big market estimates, because sometimes they come true. - Tad LaFountain