60 million hosts - 200 million internet users
950 million phone lines - 3,000 million telephone users

host computer growth rate 80%
telephone service growth rate 10%

Is it really the most incredible thing to come along and shake up the fundamentals of how mankind does business?

Before beginning the next section on “Who is e-Business” let us pause and reflect on all the drama and hype devoted to the Internet as a force shaking the very foundations of business. Is all this fuss merited? Or is the Internet and its graphically enhanced cousin the WW Web simply one of a long list of shakeups that merchants have seen since the beginning of commerce. It seems important to have some consideration on this point because if the web is the penultimate development effecting the way we do business, then it needs the most serious investigation and study. If it is just one of a long line of developments, then the wisest of us will try to work through it while spotting the signs for the next innovation to descend upon us. In retrospect, this would be like the company president who says “I’m not going to bother buying fax machines and get everybody’s business card reprinted with an extra line for the fax number … I’m going to wait 10 years to repaint the company’s truck fleet and then when I do it, I’ll add in the URL for our web site”.
WTGR
from Chpt 1 in the forthcoming book
The E-business and Internet Marketing Textbook

While elevating devices with wooden block and tackle and pulleys have been used in urban structures (such as the coliseum) as far back as the Greeks and the Romans – its wasn’t until the 1870’s that an encaged, human passenger, floor-to-floor device, (invented in 1857 by Elisha Graves Otis), had been used in over 2000 buildings of habitation and commerce. What was the effect? 

Before the widespread use of elevators for apartment buildings and office buildings, most urban buildings were three stories high with a few being four stories and smaller number being five and six. The reason for limiting the height of buildings was not due to weaknesses in building design or a lack of suitably strong materials. In fact people had been creating tall cathedrals and castles since the Middle Ages. 

The main reason buildings were limited to a few stories was because people did not want to walk that far up stairs. Once buildings, using elevators, became popular, urban society in Western Europe and North America became quite densely populated and the masses of people living in, working in and commuting to, urban centers, rose to very high numbers – with all the commensurate challenges developing for other technologies to catch up ie. Roads, water and sewage systems, etc.

Well, let us have a look at some other watershed events in business and technology and see if the web is really bigger than all previous situations, or, do we just have bad memories.

Within recent memory we have the proliferation of the fax machine. While living in Tokyo in the mid-1980’s the author was told repeatedly how the fax machine was the ultimate communications technological development since it allowed Japanese characters to be freely typed, or hand written, and then transmitted over phone lines instantly. This medium was supposed to be liberating to societies bound by having to convert their language (eg. Chinese, Korean, Arabic etc.) to the Greek/Roman alphabet and send the message through a telex machine. Fax machines exploded into the marketplace and every “with it” business person in Tokyo, London, New York and Toronto had to have a fax number on their business card.

Did the fax machine radically change the fundamentals of the way business was done? Did the 4p’s of product, place, promotion and price get thrown out of the windows of the business schools? Writing this chapter in the summer of 2000, I look over at the dust collecting on the fax machine in my home office and remind myself to tear off the latest junk mail from a travel agency, cell phone retailer or multi-level marketing business. Sure the machine was useful in the early 1990’s, but I think the last time I used it was when I received the fax from my ISP in 1996 telling me what my userid was and the URL to upload pages to my new website.

Further back beyond the fax machines could be considered such technological innovations effecting business as the commercialization of desktop computers, and further back a few decades, the telephone, the telegraph (which was the key to launching newspapers that had current information) and then back a few centuries the printing press and then maybe all the way back to the Summerians and their contributions of writing and counting systems.

What about money? Was that a watershed development that was greater than the internet? The eastern Mediterranean peoples who first used small metals disks to represent values associated with certain trade goods were creating a radically new concept for commerce. This concept, later used by the Greeks and Romans, who minted coins in such vast numbers they are still being dug up today in European, North African and Middle Eastern farm fields – was a far step from the barter system that had been good enough for tens of thousands of years.

What can we summarize from looking at these historical events? Each one was succeeded by an advancement that was not only better than the previous technology, but, more importantly, the use of the new technology spread faster than its predecessor to the point where we have seen in the immediate past, the internet reach global critical mass in just 4 short years from 1996¹  to 2000.

What can we learn from understanding the increasing fast spread of new technologies, namely that the web has spread past in the past 4 years, but the next innovation (maybe m-commerce) will spread even faster since it will have the structure of the web on which to spread upon.

1  While the efforts of Tim Berner-Lee and the World Wide Web made available an easy graphical navigation of the Internet in 1994, the pace of early adoption and the growth of ISPs did not allow for a critical mass of people to be online til about 1996. 

WTGR
from Chpt 1 in the forthcoming book
The E-business and Internet Marketing Textbook