Who Runs This Show Anyway?
The world of business has always been a pretty rough and tumble place, with competitors using innuendo, unfair trade practices, monopolies, bribes, and other unsavory techniques to ensure their individual success in the marketplace. More recently, consumers have become a little savvier. These days, companies that thrive are those that work with the community, becoming “good corporate citizens,” and trying to make a positive addition to their communities.
The Internet is no different from any other community, and those companies that “go native” by brushing up on the network’s culture and mores will gain a competitive advantage in the electronic marketplace .
Taking time to learn about the Internet now can pay big dividends in the future. If the current growth rate is sustained, more than 50,000,000 people will be accessible through the Internet by the turn of the century. Companies that jump in early and learn how to work with the Internet community will become productive, valued members of cyberspace; those that don’t may end up as roadkill on tomorrow’s Infobahn.
The quickest way to hitch a ride on the information highway is by hopping aboard the Internet. Created in 1969 as a way to link the U.S. Defense Department with high-level university researchers working on sensitive government projects, the Internet has no central computer that stores its millions of gigabytes of information. That’s because the government feared that, in the event of a nuclear attack, all its valuable military data could be destroyed. As a result, the Internet became a decentralized network with data stored on each of thousands of computers.
That’s good news for our country’s defense but not for today’s business users. Unlike traditional online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online, the Internet has no central mainframe to dial into, no 800 number to call for a starter kit, precious little easy-to-use navigational software, and no technical support staff to call with problems or questions. Check with some of your colleagues, and you’ll find that the Internet interface they see is probably very different from your own, with Mac and PC systems vying with UNIX systems for greatest popularity and dialup access offering a primitive text-based view of the information highway.