ECW1
Office Futures
ECW1
Issue 1, August 7, 1999
+++ The News Is Good
+++ A Meditation on Marketing Sub-standard Products
+++ It's a Meta World for Mega Commerce
+++ Notes from a Small Island
+++ Great Press Releases of Our Time
+++ Well Read
+++ About eComWatch
+++ The News Is Good
Noted anthropologist Wilfred Thesiger wrote in Arabian Sands that, when nomads met in the wastes of the great deserts, the first question after the ritual greetings was "What is the news". The unvarying reply, no matter how awful the news the other carried, was "The news is good".
This strikes us as an eminently sensible idea. As crotchety greybeards, grown old and wise in the ways of the press release and the launch party, we are cynical of ready promises of seamless, global paradigm shifts just for you, just in time and just too wonderful for words. Even so, the news really is amazingly good.
After half a decade of dreams, hype and occasional false starts, the Web technologies really are revolutionising the business world. Public sales sites on the Web are merely the visible tip of an iceberg that contains wonders such as:
patients in remote communities able to consult top physicians via video-conferencing with sophisticated testing carried out online;smart manuals which a mechanic can plug into your broken down car and get an exact diagnosis of the problem and analysis of the fix;electronic town halls and more. Sci-Fi writer John Brunner with his prophetic Delphi Boards and phages should be with us at this hour;electronic agents which can search out the goods or information you want, and dicker with other agents to obtain them;and much, much more.The wonder is that so much of it has been created by volunteers, amateurs and altruists. Open standards have proved remarkable robust and, so far, have withstood challenges from the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Novell to replace them with proprietary standards.
Vendors propose, but users dispose. So far, users have shown remarkable nous in accepting the good from proposals while rejecting the self-serving corporate agendas behind innovations such as Java, the GIF, the Network Computer. In doing so, they have moved us closer to the possibility of friction-free markets where perfect knowledge leads to perfect pricing. We can still get ripped off, of course, but we can easily find out how badly.
Then do something about it.
The Internet is the closest thing we have to an economic, cultural and political level playing field. As the cliché has it, no one knows you're a dog on the Internet. Success is available to anyone with a good idea and know-how. And the rewards can be breathtaking. As we have seen repeatedly, big bucks help, but they can't help you if the idea is wrong or the execution poor.
It is increasingly an equal opportunity Internet. It used to be said that the computer you want always costs $5,000. Even at the top end, this is down by half. But, more exciting, the Web is open to anyone who can cobble together a machine based on the Intel 8086 chip (all the necessary to be had for the cost of a couple of beers) and scrounge a 2400-baud connection. The implications for the developing world are staggering - commerce, education, the free exchange of ideas! If we grump, forgive us. We will tend to concentrate on the grit in the system, because that is where change is needed. It is also where strategies - our key focus - are needed to translate ideas into realities.
The Internet is a strange, complex rapidly changing place. It is also a direct lineal descendent of the first strange, complex, rapidly changing markets of Jericho. And the news is good.
+++ A Meditation on Marketing Sub-standard Products
An American venture capitalist once remarked that monopolies are like new-born children, in that they are all ugly, unless, of course, they happen to be your own.
Monopolies in the computer software industry are no less unattractive to the neutral onlooker. However, if you happen to have one of these mewling and puking monsters, life can be sweet. There are all sorts of things you can do because of your size that smaller and possibly smarter competitors could not get away with. It's unfair but, as has been said, history is written only about winners (and, increasingly, by the winners).
One of the privileges open to monopoly suppliers is the extended pre-announcement, which works like this. First you establish a position of dominance in a particular sector, creating de facto technical standards on the way. Then you find out that there is a related area of activity where your competitors are making too much money. They are not necessarily doing so at your expense; it's just that, like a tax gatherer, you simply dislike other people doing well. Your third step, therefore, is to create a vague but impressive-sounding scheme for capturing that part of the market.
Finally, you peddle it around the computer press, the financial press, your resellers and your customers, existing and prospective.
All of them will work to make your scheme a success. The computer press, especially in America, will be your storm troopers. They will lavish admiration on anything you propose to do, on the good old Yankee principle that the output of any company that makes lot of money must, of itself, be good. (Take, for example, the Coca Cola Company. This was Fortune magazine's "most admired" corporation in America in 1998 and the second most admired this year, yet its power and wealth rest on selling a form of adulterated water that is completely lacking in curative, health-giving or intoxicating properties and is thus completely useless.)
It is not that these journalists are dishonest, it's simply that they usually know nothing outside the world that you have created. They have neither the experience to see matters in a wider frame of reference nor the proper journalistic instinct to question the basis upon which you operate.
As Humbert Wolfe pointed out in his poem, Over the Fire:
You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.
The financial press - your cavalry - also works for you. It is similarly uncaring about the moral value or utility of what you do; its sole concern is its effect on your share price. Also, most financial journalists are not technically equipped to understand the deficiencies in your plan.
Your resellers, who are your poor bloody infantry, will all see the opportunity to make money out of your planned product, so will stifle any doubts they may have about its practicality or the likelihood of its delivery in the planned time frame.
Saddest of all, your existing customers will become your collaborators, publicly supporting your new product or 'architecture'. They will seemingly forget your history of broken promises, your inadequate support arrangements and the ever-increasing cost of using your products. Instead, they will pay you to become beta testers of the product, will allow their name to be used in your press releases and, in the ultimate act of self-deception, will stand up and be discounted at your seminars and press conferences. It's the corporate equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome, in which kidnap victims form close emotional attachments to their captors.
While all this is going on, a kind of planning blight will have descended on the buying plans of the users of competing products, especially in large companies. Either of their own volition or under the promptings of technical emissaries you have sent out to parlay with them, they put their future purchases of other suppliers' products on hold. Some will even cancel them, to your delight and your competitors' dismay.
In due course you begin shipments of the new product. It will be late, of course, but you don't mind. Your existing customers were hooked months ago, your competitors' ex-customers will be relieved that the waiting is over and the press will proclaim it a triumph. Ah, the joys of a level playing field.
Many years ago, in a BBC television programme about tourism in the Channel Islands, a rather grand gentleman of the old school said that he and the islands' councillors had no wish to get rich "by selling junk to mugs". Such gentlemen, such sentiments and such scruples are of a long-gone age. Such sentiments and such scruples are surplus to requirements in the software industry.
-oOo-
+++ It's a Meta World for Mega Commerce
Television advertising is one of the great bellwethers for American culture and commerce. Creative Directors, being a trendy lot, are barely weeks behind the time in presenting their takes on the prevailing memes.
Two significant trends are currently apparent. The first is designed to reassure us that we are not mere numbers, little nuggets of ore in a giant data-mine. Thus, a great bank (my own, as it happens) works 'one customer at a time'. A great investment house judges its performance 'one investor at a time'. A DIY supplier serves us 'one project at a time'. I can't even write what the optometrist promises do one at a time without bursting into giggles. Bet Hugh Grant's publicist can't wait to climb onto this bandwagon.
The second is what we might legitimately call meta-advertising: advertising designed solely to drive traffic to a Website where the real pitch will be made. The subdivisions provide an overview of a number of the battles taking place. Disintermediation vs. reintermediation is interesting as purely digital discount brokers take on the cyber arms of bricks and mortar giants.
IBM spends money like water to promote its vision of global e-commerce without a word of explanation as to what it actually offers. Banks flicker in and out with almost tentative promotions of their Internet banking services. And an increasing number of television programmes and entire channels use valuable screen space to drive viewers to Website tie-ins.
There is logic in this. Offline is a good place to drum up online business.
A few years ago a publisher I was working with put a simple single sheet promoting his Website into a standard mailer promoting other products. Traffic rose exponentially.
Although advertising likes to talk up its leadership role, it is an industry that almost entirely follows - with a herd instinct that puts clearing bankers to shame.
The sheer volume of advertising being put behind e-commerce in its many manifestations is probably a clearer and harder proof than even NASDAQ frenzy that Web commerce has grabbed a major chunk of corporate America's front of mind.
You would think that the people making the 'one customer at a time' claims were playing to the Web and the use of Web tools to personalize the visitor' s experience. No: it's a 'cross our threshold' message. We think it's part of the same phenomenon. The user empowerment which Web commerce has enabled is already redefining consumer expectations beyond the Internet. People are coming to expect a 'one on one' relationship, personalization and the revision of the offering to users known or stated preferences. However, as a customer of the bank referred to, I note that while they actually deliver a good Internet experience, deeds actually lag well behind the claims in the physical banking hall. In the queue, it is indeed one customer at a time - but it's a very long time. And, to take that one step further, consumers seem increasingly impatient with voice mail jungles, seventeen year olds with scripts and expert systems that aren't.
An Internet site uses clever database technology to make an experience intrinsically much less personal than a visit to your local bank branch seem both personal and human. It is ironic that the simulacrum can feel so much more real than the real world.
-oOo-
+++ Notes from a Small Island
Can governments actively foster and support the development of vibrant communities of IT businesses? Our Poujadiste instincts say no. A succession of spectacular talent spotting failures dating back at least to the 64k chip and beyond, to Harold Wilson's White Hot Technological Revolution (yes we know he never actually said that any more than Norman Tebbit actually told the unemployed to "get on yer bike") underscore that belief.
This week I saw further evidence where I temporarily reside - in Canada's smallest province, Prince Edward Island.
PEI is about the size of Wales with the population of a middling English market town. Dependent on tourism, agriculture and fishing (fishermen are now racing the cod to extinction), a large part of the population works a three month year. Most of the rest work for the government federal, provincial or local.
Not surprisingly, the provincial government sees IT, and the Web technologies in particular, as the most probable source of a long term solution to chronic unemployment and underemployment. The imagined high added value of IT jobs and the tax base of imagined high IT salaries are further incentives.
Canada, being a confederal state, devolves huge powers to the provinces. A Canadian province is almost as autonomous as a member of the EU, probably more so if that member happens to be Luxembourg. The possibilities, therefore, for creating an IT paradise in the land of Anne of Green Gables are therefore potentially huge.
The public sector, with well over half of provincial GDP, is by far the largest consumer of IT good and services. As such, it could be a significant driver, even before applying its arsenal of grants and other incentives.
In its wisdom, the government has just announced that, after a year of closed door negotiations, it has handed over a four year contract to manage its networks and network development to a consortium consisting of the local telco and an Oracle developer specialized in public services applications.
General Electric is a third player, providing lease finance and fairly vague (in public pronouncements) undertakings to try to find investment opportunities and encourage Island companies to become suppliers to GE.
This is being promoted as a major driver of IT policy.
The telco is unlikely to be a challenger to BT any time soon. Heck, it's unlikely to be a challenge to Telefonica Gambia. It introduced e-commerce services to much fanfare: that turned out to be a readily downloadable shopping cart template. When it set up online secure servers for e-commerce, it forgot to provide reverse lookup tables. A security minded customer looking up a shop - or the telco itself - would be informed it was based in Afghanistan. When they introduced ADSL, they didn't mention to customers that any shared drives or directories would be visible to any other ADSL customer - and wide open.
The Oracle developer has a successful practice, primarily serving the public sector. Our lawyers say that's probably a complete enough description. You are all, of course, familiar with GE's role at the bleeding edge.
This triumvirate is to create a world center of excellence, according to the press releases.
The interesting thing is that the government set much store by the founding of an IT trade association as a vehicle to encourage the development of the aforementioned vibrant IT community. It naturally has devoted much of its time to promoting transparency and neutrality in public tendering and purchasing. (Many objected to a consistent pattern of contracts going to firms owned by former officials.) The first the trade association heard of the deal was an invitation to attend the press release announcing it. Its president is the owner of the Oracle developer. And a former public servant.
-oOo-
+++ Great Press Releases of Our Time
(The first of what's likely to be a long-running series)
We received a few days ago from BancTec, a document management company, a press release headed: "What do Julia Roberts and BancTec have in common?".
Our immediate reaction was that at least one of them is bland, one-dimensional and over-priced, but our lawyers won't let us say further than that. Apparently the 'right' answer is that the latest BancTec launch took place in the same hotel suite as a scene in the film "Notting Hill" in which the toothy one held a press conference. We could have kicked ourselves for not seeing such an obvious link. Actually a closer link (let's play Michael Caine here) is that Sanj Bhaskar, who appears in the film, once worked in IT PR, for the redoubtable Eric Leach, whom God preserve.
If you've got any examples of similarly desperate PR writing, mail 'em over and we'll print the worst.
-oOo-
+++ Well Read
Internet and Electronic Commerce Law in the European Union, by John Dickie, Hart Publishing, Oxford and Portland Oregon, 1999. ISBN 1ï· 84113 031 1. Paperback, 154 pages. £27.00 at UK online bookshops.
Anyone contemplating trading electronically in or with member states of the European Union faces a set of laws and regulations that is backward looking, ill-defined, internally inconsistent and applied differently according to national inclinations. It is the juridical equivalent of spaghetti code, overlaid with chauvinism.
The EU's main visible response to this situation was a 1997 declaration of intent to set up a coherent European legal framework for electronic commerce by 2000. That framework is intended to simultaneously create trust and confidence in ecommerce (for everyone except Hotmail users, one supposes) and to ensure full access to the single market.
Achieving that target in the sixteen months left until the start of the new Millennium is extremely unlikely and this new book helps to explain why. It analyses past and present European legislative activities, discusses the various delays and inconsistencies in national and Europe-wide law-making and points out significant trends.
It is written by John Dickie, a researcher at the school of law at Warwick University. An academic writing about EU law sounds like a sure-fire recipe for impenetrability but Dickie writes in an approachable and straightforward style. He has devoted separate chapters to financial services and taxation, cryptography and electronic signatures, copyright, data protection, consumer protection, 'distance' contracts and to the future.
Dickie marshals his evidence meticulously and makes his points carefully, illustrating them with examples of case law. He does not cloak his opinions, though. These could be summed up in this one sentence of his: "The law is a labyrinth, clouding the rules for all market actors." He believes that individual states are losing their legislative autonomy in this area and also exposes what he considers to be an underlying conflict between protection for the individual and for the market. In his opinion, the latter is winning.
The book is as up to date as anything published traditionally could be, which means it could well have been months out of date by the time it was printed. Fortunately, as the book makes clear, EU law-making imitates the mills of God in its speed. Nevertheless, it would have been useful to have linked the book's text to its own updatable Web site. (On the other hand, given the rickety state of his university's Web site, which has numerous dead links and doesn't even list him among the staff of its law school, this may have been a sensible decision on the author's part.)
The reader is presumed to know his way around the law, at least at the level of the educated layman, and to know about the EU's various bodies and their responsibilities. There are lists of cases and laws cited and of useful Web sites, a short index and a perfunctory glossary of Web and ecommerce terms.
My main criticism is of the book's production. The text's readability is diminished by the use of tiny type and by having footnotes rather than chapter-end notes. The result is daunting to the eye. Also, the cover has a fusty and outdated computer interface theme to it, including representing the author's name as "John~Dickie".
Despite my reservations about the way the book is presented, I found it a concise and comprehensible guide to a confusing subject. It is no instant 'pop' manual ("EU E-Commerce Law for the Mentally Deficient") and demands time to read. It will appeal, in my view, mainly to legislators, in-house and specialist lawyers and the thoughtful ecommerce manager.
PS If you'd like to stay up to date on the EU's activities on ecommerce, go to http://www.ispo.cec.be/ecommerce/.
-oOo-
About eComWatch
eComWatch is edited and published by Roger Whitehead and Christopher Ogg. Copyright Roger Whitehead and Christopher Ogg, 2002. eComWatch may be circulated freely in its original format with copyright notice intact. For permission to reproduce any article,