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Agree? Disagree? Stop sounding off to your computer screen! Instead,
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Remember the paperless office prediction of the 1970s? Twenty years later, companies that can't make files fast enough are still laughing about that one, all the way to the bank. So, who'd be willing to take a risk and say we'll all be shopping electronically in the near future?
BY 2007, 15-20 MILLION OF US WILL BE BUYING 20 PERCENT OF OUR GROCERIES OVER THE INTERNET.
Actually, people who should know (better)--CEOs from North America, Europe, and Asia questioned in a 1998 Price Waterhouse/World Economic Forum survey said that electronic commerce would either completely reshape how they do business (20 percent) or change it significantly (59 percent). Forty-three percent already market their products on the Internet (so does Herman Miller, which sells office chairs at hmstore.com).
Experts from Andersen Consulting say that by 2007 15-20 million of us will be buying 20 percent of our groceries over the Internet. Already, 75,000 busy households in seven cities are doing it with Peapod, the nation's largest online grocery-shopping service.
Beyond the lure of convenience, three things, all intertwined and all well underway, are coming together to make the Internet the place to shop: - Improved security--as in, will we ever feel comfortable, completely comfortable, paying for transactions online?
- Friendlier machines--as in, will the equipment we use to surf the Web ever get more fun to use?
- Changing attitudes--as in, will "pig in a poke" buying (obscuring the real nature of something offered for sale, in this case because it's seen only on screen) ever replace the sensory delight of touching a fabric or kicking the tires or thumping a melon?
Encryption has its kryptonite
Superman was invincible, except for that little matter of his fatal allergy to kryptonite. Encryption, the process of taking "plaintext," such as a message with your credit card number in it, and scrambling it into "ciphertext" for safe transmission over the Internet, can get the sniffles from a virus called hackers. There is recent evidence, however, that these electronic villains are about as scarce as kryptonite.
THE CHANCES OF A HACKER BREAKING INTO YOUR COMPUTER ARE ONCE IN 540 YEARS.
John Howard of Sandia/California National Laboratories in his 1997 dissertation An Analysis Of Security Incidents On The Internet 1989 - 1995 argues that the Internet is no riskier than other activities we take right in stride, such as stopping in a convenience store or driving a car. Howard's analysis, based on CERT Coordination Center studies of Internet security, puts the chances of a hacker breaking into your computer at once in 540 years. You should live that long.
Comparison of Estimated Rates That Risks Occur | | Risk | Estimated Rate | | Root Break-In, Internet Domain | 1 out of 10 years | | Root Break-In, Internet Host | 1 out of 540 years | | Convenience Store Robbery | 1 out of 1.5 years | | Hard Disk Failure | 1 out of 75 years | | 100 Year Flood | 1 out of 100 years | | Serious Structural Fire, NYC | 1 out of 220 years | | Death in Motor Vehicle | 1 out of 6,250 years | | Death Due to Fire, NYC | 1 out of 40,000 years |
Source: Analysis of Security Incidents on the Internet, 1989-1995 |
A well-chosen password, regular backups of data, and good virus protection software are really all you need to be as secure surfing the Internet as you are tooling around town. The merchants and banks dealing on the Internet will do the rest with a combination of internal controls and "firewalls" designed to prevent hackers from "sniffing" your credit card number.
A world safe for chiropractors
If you've ever shopped the Internet, you know what a pain in the neck (and the wrist and the digits) it can be. This is due in large part to the fact that we've been asked to contort ourselves to match the physical layout of the computer and not the other way around.
There is history at work here. Computers began as huge, whirring machines 10 feet tall and 150 feet wide that cost millions and could execute up to 5,000 operations per second. Wow. Such power meant they were so much in demand that no one thought about how uncomfortable they were to operate.
UNTIL RECENTLY, COMPUTING POWER WAS SO MUCH IN DEMAND NO ONE STOPPED TO CONSIDER HOW UNCOMFORTABLE COMPUTERS WERE TO USE.
As Nicholas Negroponte, professor of Media Technology at MIT and founding director of the Media Lab, says in his book Being Digital, "It used to be considered wasteful and frivolous to devote time and money to the user interface, because computer cycles were so precious and had to be expended on the problem, not the person."
Now that low-cost computing power has allowed us to focus on making computers easier to use, Negroponte says "the challenge for the next decade is . . . to make computers that know you, learn about your needs, and understand verbal and nonverbal languages," where talking, pointing, and looking work together in an interaction "that is less about messaging back and forth and more like face-to-face, human-to-human conversation."
Lest you think this pure science fiction, note that the researchers at Interval, an R&D center Paul Allen and David Liddle started in 1992, have a program under development that lets a PC "hear" the differences in agitation in your voice. And, as an example of perhaps the closest human-computer interface yet, they're also working on computers that live in your clothes.
Imagine the cleaning bills. Imagine how long it will take for these breakthroughs to reach us. Now, imagine something that, depending on where you live, could transform your Internet shopping experience in the blink of a baud.
Even with the beefiest computer, bits only travel so fast down your phone line (and maybe someday soon, your cable TV line). That's what makes scrolling through the "aisles" at Peapod a drag, or waiting for a catalog page with a photo to appear seem like eternity.
ADSL CAN MOVE DATA IN ONE DIRECTION 175 TIMES FASER THAN A 33.6 KBPS MODEM--ON YOUR EXISTING COPPER TELEPHONE LINES.
The answer? Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), the oldest new technology ever. It seems that the copper telephone lines running to your house and mine have a wide spectrum available for transmission, and we've only been using the part that can handle voice data. The other part can transmit regular old data at over 6 Mbps per second in one direction.
Data moving in two directions (to and from your computer) moves at speeds up to 640 Kbps. Compared to a 33.6 Kbps modem, ADSL moves one-way data about 175 times faster and two-way communications about 20 times faster--on your existing phone lines. Put another way, you could download the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in 31 minutes compared to the 27 hours it would take using a standard 28.8 Kbps modem.
So, if you're one of the lucky Ameritech customers living in Ann Arbor or Royal Oak, Michigan, you can get speed right now. Chicago-area customers should have it by mid-1998, and seven out of 10 of the company's customers are supposed to have the service available three years from now. Other folks, GTE and AT&T among them, are also getting into the act.
ADSL will cost you, however. It uses a pair of transceivers, special modems, one of which you buy and install in your home. That costs $199. Installation is another $150, and the monthly service fee is $59.95. A bit pricey compared to most Internet Service Provider fees, but obviously the phone companies are banking on our need for speed.
They're probably right. But will speed be enough to change the way we think about Internet shopping, or will we continue to reach for the car keys, instead of the mouse?
Who will buy this wonderful morning?
When Oliver leans out of the window of Mr. Brownlow's house in Lionel Bart's 1968 movie take on Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, the boy is awash in the sights, sounds, and smells of the day, and the peddlers' wares--sweet red roses, ripe strawberries, snow-white milk. It's no wonder he'd like to tie it all up with a ribbon and put it in a box. For a good many of us, the sensory part of the sale (trying on, easing into, spinning the dials, kicking the tires) is the whole point.
The fact that the Internet is currently rather limited in its ability to give us the experience of shopping is probably one reason why its sales are still modest (about one percent of $2.5 trillion in annual retail sales), and our attitudes a bit antediluvian.
Case in point: The WIRED/Merrill Lynch survey that polled 1,444 randomly selected Americans. Even among those the pollsters call "Superconnected," those who use email at least three days a week and use a laptop, a cell phone, a beeper, and a home computer, less than half (37%) had made between one and 10 purchases on the Internet in the past year.
John Katz in his WIRED article about the survey says that being connected is "about sharing knowledge and information, and spreading ideas and prosperity. These are the core values and goals of Digital Citizens." Where's the shop in that?
PROGRESSIVE ONLINE RETAILERS ARE LETTING THEIR CUSTOMERS COMPARE COMPETITORS' PRICES WITHOUT FORCING THEM TO LEAVE THEIR SITES.
Part of the problem may be knowing what to buy. Compare.net can help a shopper do just that: compare various brands of a product. (Find it and other shopping agents at your favorite search engine's home page.) Progressive sites, such as NECX, an online computer retailer, are letting their customers compare prices of identical items on competitors' sites without forcing them to leave the merchant's site.
As Kevin Jones of the New York Times reports, "on the Web, a site that has complete information from a variety of sources can be more valuable than any single site that only represents proprietary or partial information."
Then, too, the biggest gains in e-commerce will come in the area of what Negroponte calls "bit-based" commodities--i.e., anything that can be digitized. The fact that this stuff (from movies to newspapers, from software to college courses, from airline tickets to securities transactions) can be delivered instantaneously (or thereabouts, as modem speeds increase) will make these types of transactions a mainstay of the Internet in the future.
Less important, but also vital to e-commerce, will be what Michael Dertouzos in his book What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives calls "indirect electronic commerce," which "handles the advertising, searching, selling, contracting, settling, and other such information-related functions, though the actual goods are physical goods shipped on traditional transportation systems."
For stuff that can't be digitized, the Internet will be a great place to comparison shop, if not always the place to culminate the sale. But even that will change fast as kids raised on extended keyboards and pull-down menus become adult consumers.
A new U.S. Department of Commerce study called "The Emerging Digital Economy" says that by the end of last year, 10 million Americans (and a goodly number of Canadians) bought everything from airline tickets to books to cars online. Forrester Research predicts online shopping revenues will clock in at $4.8 billion by the end of 1998. These numbers just go to show we're getting the hang of shopping on the Internet.
Increasing transmission speeds will jack those numbers up as we get where we want to go faster, so we can make our purchase decision sooner. And security will improve even as we're becoming as comfortable with an Internet transaction as we are with using an ATM. It's possible that eventually we'll be using photons to transmit data, allowing us to shop the Internet at the speed of light. If that's the case, then our current standard of six million bits per second will seem like "surfing" the Web--on the back of a tortoise. RANDALL BRAAKSMA writes about life, liberty, and the pursuit of connectedness from his home office/personal shopping center.
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