We spend a
lot of time tracking the growth of the Net or the growth of Net commerce. But what about
the predictions about Net commerce?
All of the major forecasting firms who look at Net commerce have found themselves
needing to increase their estimates as the true growth in Net commerce outstripped the
best guesses. Jupiter communications, for example, was predicting in 1996 that electronic
commerce would generate $7.3 billion worth of revenue in the year 2000. Their estimate now
is for $15.6 billion. Jupiter is not alone, there are similar stories at Forrester
Research and International Data Corporation (IDC).
WALLY'S COMMENT ... Let's be clear about what's going on here. We're not talking about
pie-in-the-sky, get-rich-quick-if-you-buy-my-book estimates about electronic commerce.
We're talking about responsible estimates by responsible firms and qualified analysts. So
what's the problem?
Simply that this is new territory. I love reading the history of the development of the
American West. It seems that the explorers and settlers there were constantly coming over
one rise or another and discovering something that was bigger, or more beautiful, or more
threatening, or more something else than what they'd expected. The same thing is happening
here.
The bottom line is to take these estimates for what they are, good, responsible, and
probably wrong in detail, but right in direction.
Think of this as similar to the settlement of the North American western frontier. The
analogy is apt and helpful.
Frontier settlement happened in five basic stages.
In the beginning there were folks on what European settlers called the frontier. Native
peoples had their own culture and way of understanding the world around them. That culture
would later exist only in pockets as settlement rolled across the West.
On the net, the analogy would be to the first folks who showed up on ARPANET and the
first people exchanging email over what would become the Internet. On the net, those folks
were mostly researchers, engineers and academics. The early culture of the net reflected
their professional culture, with the added force brought by government edict that made the
early net "non-commercial."
Then Europeans started showing up in the West and other explorers and trappers showed
up on the Net. These folks came for a variety of reasons. Some were just exploring. Some
just wanted to "get away." Others were looking for some sort of commercial
advantage.
I was probably one of those first "trappers." In 1982 I signed up with
CompuServe because I wanted access to information and to people that would help my
business be more profitable. 1986 brought my first Internet connection. At the time there
were less than half a million folks on the net.
It was a wonderful world for me, though. I could get information in ways I'd never been
able to. I could reach people for sales and expertise that were unreachable before. I made
my first sale online sometime back in the early 80s. The first sale over the Internet
happened in 1987, when it was technically illegal.
Those days are chronicled well in Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's excellent book, Where
Wizards Stay Up Late. Check it out at Amazon.com at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0684832674/wallybockA/
Like early Western explorers, those of us on the net then put up with
some hardships. I remember green screens and command lines and 300 baud modems that sent
me information at a glacial pace. Like others, I was there for commercial purposes but
also because it was a hell of a lot of fun. For me it was a bit like my first experience
of the jungle.
Folks kept showing up in the West for fun, and to get away and for profit. Most of them
mixed all three motives together in their own personal blend. Pretty soon, settlements
started to happen.
CompuServe forums were an early form of online community for me, but the community that
had the biggest impact on me and on many others was the WELL. The Whole Earth Lectronic
Link, a brainchild of Stewart Brand, was the first real experience for me of what virtual
community might be.
Howard Rheingold has done an excellent book about the WELL as it was then. It's called
The Virtual Community.
In the West there were more and more settlements. The railroads opened markets and
brought new settlers. There were lots of scams, too. Folks were lured West with the
promise of acres of fertile land, only to find that they'd bought hard ground, the
opportunity to build and live in a sod hut and the joys of winter on the great plains.
Books like Willa Cather's O Pioneers and Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth chronicle that time
in the West.
The routes and settlements happened online, too. CompuServe, Prodigy and others opened
Internet connections. The WELL gave us a real internet address for email. Companies like
Netcom were started and others like Netscape brought ways to make the experience easier.
In the West, the coming of the railroads and settlements were awful for the original
residents and for the explorers and trappers and pioneers. In the West and on the Net they
backed up, fought holding actions, and spent time among themselves. Some even went over to
the new world that was more and more like the "civilization" they'd never wanted
to be a part of.
As the actual frontier aspects of the West began to disappear toward the end of the
19th Century, an entire fanciful literature emerged that romanticized the entire
experience. Outlaws and eccentrics were glorified at the very time when standards and laws
were beginning to take hold. That's happening right now on the net. As actual life in the
West become more and more like life everywhere else, the books about it created a West of
old that never actually existed.
That's about where we are right now. You can expect a couple of more years of hammering
out standards, but the territory is taking on the shape it will have for quite a while.
The frontier isn't all gone yet, but it is changing and beginning to look more and more
like other, settled places.
This material originally appeared in Wally Bock’s Briefing Memo Newsletter of 15
May 1998.
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