[11596] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Internet benefits-summary and questions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick St.Peters)
Sun Apr 10 14:58:18 1994
Date: Sun, 10 Apr 94 14:21:41 EDT
From: stpeters@bird.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
To: tennant@metronet.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Reply-To: <stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com>
>From: tennant@metronet.com (Harry Tennant)
>Dick St.Peters gave an interesting analogy to air conditioning which, being
>a heavy net user, I am sympathetic to. However, heating and air
>conditioning benefit from the prospects having a felt need for the product
>(they are cold or hot).
The point of my post, of course, was to get you to see that you were
asking the wrong question, or at least asking in the wrong terms. I
didn't think saying "The value of the Internet isn't well articulated
by lists of discrete benefits" would have been nearly as effective.
> Not so with Internet. The uninitiated often see
>it only as an expense at first. Internet is much like PCs 15 years
>ago--lots of potential but demonstrated value was rare. Spreadsheets came
>along giving relief to a felt need. Today, many people talk of Mosaic as
>the net's "killer application" (like spreadsheets), but what is the felt
>need that Mosaic (or other net capabilities) satisfies?
Interaction, for a one-word summary. Communication is the largest part of
interaction, and "retrieving information" is a form of communication.
Interaction is crucial to business in a continuous, ongoing way. You
would not articulate the value of the telephone to business by listing
a bunch of calls you made to place or receive orders. To get across its
real value, you would have to talk about its role in "social" networking,
building relationships with customers and suppliers and colleagues. You
might find an occasional call that by itself justified a telephone - "The
building caught fire, but I saved it by calling the fire department" - but
basing a case for telephones in business on them misses the essence of
what telephones are for. Same for the Internet.
(My guess is that a few centuries from now historians will see the overall
outline of human evolution/history in terms three epochal developments in
communication: language, writing, telecommunications. They will see the
latter beginning with the telegraph; telephone, radio, tv, Internet are
all steps on the way to ... to what?)
Interaction is a strongly-felt need, and the Internet does a lot to meet it.
--
Dick St.Peters, Gatekeeper, The Pearly Gateway; currently at:
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
