ECW5
Office Futures
ECW5
Issue 5, November 10, 1999
+++Of comptoirs, counters and back offices
+++Death of a tradition
+++Time for less paper publishing? (Part 1 of 2)
+++Mahir and Hamsters point up dot.com futility
+++About eComWatch
+++Of comptoirs, counters and back offices
The French use the term comptoir, which translates fairly closely to our "counter", to indicate a shop or emporium (another lovely word). The Comptoir Irlandais, for example, could reasonably be anticipated to signal a shop specialising in all manner of things Irish. With Gallic precision, the French nail it: the sales counter is the shop.
The sales counter embodies much of what we most enjoy and most rely on in our shopping, when we contemplate shopping as a pleasure rather than a chore. The shop counter represents the relationship with the merchant, the chat, the gossip, the advice and maybe a chance to dicker. It also represents after-sales service where you go to get advice on how to put the widget together, or where your wife replaces the size 8 you deliberately bought her for the size 12 she really wears. (Some lies will be forgiven us.) For most ecommerce sites, this is the stuff of the back end, to be automated as far as possible or performed by clones if absolutely essential. Even Amazon.com, which prides itself on giving free rein to the creativity of its visitors, reportedly limits its e-mail based support staff to the most rigidly formulaic of responses.
On most sites, the closest you get to the idea of the "sales counter" is the shopping cart program. That's not unlike trying to define the shopping experience in terms of a supermarket trolley: OK for staple foods, but probably not what you want for most discretionary purchases where there is some element of pleasure in the acts of browsing and selection.
Interactivity is probably the key driving force of the Internet. E-mail, and to a lesser extent variants on IRC chat, remain the killer apps for most users. Yet it plays an insignificant part on the majority of ecommerce sites. This is doubly puzzling in the case of B2B sites, given the traditional importance attributed to personal relationships in the business-to-business world. And remember that all the analysts tell us that B2B is the area that will initially dominate ecommerce.
The technology exists to recreate the sales counter and give it additional bells and whistles to add elements of value that would be difficult to recreate in a bricks and mortar shop. For example, Land's End ( http://www.landsend.com), in its current TV advertising, focuses centrally on your ability to chat in real time (either via a text-based chat program or a second telephone line) with a sales assistant. You can also go shopping with a friend, each from your own browser. There is the ability to create a model of yourself correct for colouring and general dimensions to "try things on" and see how they look. This is, in some respects, the clothing shop equivalent of Amazon's shared reviews, readers' comments, and the remembering of your reading habits.
Nice as it is, none of this is rocket science. Basic collaborative tools, including application sharing, whiteboarding and chat, have been around for ages and are available free in their vanilla incarnations.
Indeed, chat is one of the earliest and most popular Internet tools, and was even a feature of the much-lamented golden age of the BBS.
Voice-over-IP has been around for years and is viable, if not brilliant, over modem connections. In the high speed Internet of the future, real time high quality voice and video will be options than knock an 0800 number into a cocked hat.
So why the reluctance to build on the Web's strongest tools? It can't be because shopping cart routines work so well. Discussions in the ecommerce newsgroups suggest that abandonment rates routinely run as high as 75%, with even post-sales repudiation often running at 25% or more. Now, real estate agents and used car salesmen may be inured to tyre-kicker rates at that sort of level, but most businesses would die if 75% of those who began an actual transaction (as opposed to wandering in for a browse) dumped the goods on the counter and departed.
People, of course, are expensive. Most businesses spent much of the past decade getting rid of people, not hiring them. Firms that think voice mail is pretty neat are unlikely to be easily persuaded that having people sitting around chatting to punters online is a brilliant idea. It is an idea that flies in the face of the thinking of the accountancy-led IT consultants, who retain a touching faith in the idea that an expert system really could replace Old Fred if only you could throw enough money at it.
Oddly silent in all this have been the call centre operators. They have profited hugely from the proposition that it is more sensible to save payroll (and a host of other people problems) by outsourcing. Elements of the business that don't relate to the core competencies may well be better and more cost-effectively undertaken by specialists optimised for tasks such as customer support.
They themselves face huge challenges as computing and telephony continue their convergence. Necessarily the successful ones will gravitate to blended web and telephony solutions certainly utilising VOIP as bandwidth increases and becomes cheaper. For many firms, call centre type operations may be how they handle the need for real interactivity. And, we submit, interactivity is the key to increasing average value per transaction (just as in the "real world"), reducing abandonment rates, detecting fraud and reducing repudiation.
-oOo-
+++Death of a tradition
The news that Encyclopedia Britannica has gone over to free publication on the Web came as no great surprise to most observers. Sales of it in book form had fallen to a fifth of their 1990 level and the company's earlier attempts at electronic publishing were not bringing in anything like the money hoped for.
EB has been in publication for over 200 years, the last 50 of them as an encyclopedia Americana, based in Chicago. Perhaps because of this long history, it has never seemed at ease with the digital age. It was late with a CD-ROM version at the beginning of this decade and, even when it thought it had stolen a march with its 1993 patent on CD publishing, this was later disallowed.
The CD version was originally overpriced as well as late. As The Industry Standard put it in its report (see http://www.thestandard.com/articles/display/0,1449,7091,00.html): "The rather generic Encarta product whomped EB's CD-ROM in the marketplace, offering an early proof of what is now a Microsoft marketing truism: a low-priced, 'good-enough' product that obtains ubiquity will always trump a quality product, regardless of brand loyalty."
When it went on to the Web, also tardily, EB tried a subscription model. This was no more successful. It has now embraced the whole "e-" shtick, with access available free for a time, along with free newsletters and free email accounts, and income expected from advertising and syndication. In The Industry Standard's unlovely term, www.britannica.com is now "portalized".
That EB's new Web site should buckle under the initial load because the demand was "unexpectedly high" was true to form. Marketing naivety, in not knowing the popularity of its brand, appears to have been a major factor. So too, it seems, was an unwillingness to learn from others' mistakes in not making its Web servers capacious enough. These things suggest a management team with its mind in the 1980s, at best.
The picture one gets from all this is that EB has found letting go of old business models even harder than adopting new ones. It is far from alone in this. Christopher has reminded me that Microsoft also began by trying to sell subscriptions to its online magazine, Slate, with similar results. That too is now free.
Does this then mean that electronic delivery is automatically and invariably superior to paper publishing and that the Web offers the best kind of electronic delivery? The evidence is unclear.
Take the example of Encyclopedia Britannica itself. As the owner of two versions (paper and CD) and an occasional user of the third (the Web), I get to see the pros and cons of each medium at first hand.
The paper version is bulky, expensive and out of date as soon as published. In its favour is the fact that, like all books, it consumes no power, can be read anywhere there is sufficient light and provides a multi-sensual (rather than multi-media) experience. It also encourages serendipidity the chance finding of something interesting and, possibly, useful.
Another factor is the paper version's status value. Assembled in their bookcase, lined up in stately leather-bound array in one's living room or study, the printed volumes have an imposing look about them. This undoubtedly helped EB's now disbanded army of salespeople to pitch them as a lifetime investment.
The CD version, these days, is cheap (just under £50 in its 'penny plain' version, without graphics) and easily and rapidly searchable. There are Web links at the end of most articles for updating and extending the content.
I keep mine permanently in a CD drive, ready for instant access. It is literally the work of a minute to look up something, even less if the control program and associated Netscape browser are already running.
The Web version is the most up to date and widest-ranging. Also, apart from connection costs, it is the cheapest (until the month's free subscription expires, that is). On the debit side, the Web site offers the most mechanistic searching style of the three versions, and the most distractions. I also find it to be slower than using the CD.
This version also has the greatest infrastructure requirements. You don't need a PC to use the books and you don't need Internet access for the CD edition. (You also don't need the latest type of CD drive for the older, pre-DVD, compact discs.) These things may seem trivial where incomes are high and information technology is cheap and readily available. That situation applies only in the Westernised world, and patchily even there.
There's no clear cut case for either electronic version; both have their merits and drawbacks. Alas, for all its incidental pleasures, the paper version is unlikely to find favour with many consumers. Libraries will still want it, I imagine, simply because up to twenty people can use it at once without needing twenty computers or Internet links.
-oOo-
+++Time for less paper publishing? (Part 1 of 2)
Another organization that has taken its time in coming to terms with the Web is Adobe, maker of graphics software and the Postscript print rendering language. In early 1993 the company announced the Acrobat conversion and reading tools, an attempt to create a de facto standard for electronic documents. These products use Adobe's Display Postscript, originally developed for machines like Steve Jobs's NeXt computer.
Acrobat creates an electronic document, called a "PDF" (Portable Document Format) file. This can be distributed around, and viewed and printed on, different machines and operating environments. Assembly of a PDF packages a file or files from word processors, spreadsheets and so on, and then indexes and compresses the result.
This assemblage can then be viewed, searched and printed with just the one program, Acrobat Reader. Although the document looks virtually the same as it did in the originating application or applications, the recipient of the PDF does not need access to any of those programs. Among other things, this solves the problem of distributing a document among people or organizations whose computers use dissimilar software.
At the time, Acrobat was a revolutionary concept, hard for many people to understand. Computer users were accustomed to file, print and display formats that were particular to the application program used. File converters were quite a big seller then. The Web and its use of HTML have subsequently made the idea of a neutral format a commonplace, but neither was widely known about in 1993.
Acrobat also had competition from products like Common Ground from No Hands Software, Replica from Farallon and, later, Novell's Envoy. All of them have since fallen away, leaving the field to Adobe. (It's funny how Microsoft, despite then being unconstrained in its "freedom to innovate", never got round to offering an equivalent open, cross-platform tool.) At first Adobe charged users for the reader software, as well as for the editing and compiling suites. It was not until 18 months had gone by that it began giving it away, in order to broaden the market (cf Encyclopedia Britannica, above).
The company took another year before providing users with the means to embed a URL in an Acrobat file. Until then, PDFs had had an impermeable boundary. Only in April 1996, three years after initial launch, did Adobe announce the "Amber" browser add-ins, which allowed PDFs to be viewed online.
The latest version, release 4.0, was announced in February this year, six years after the first version. In the intervening period, Acrobat has achieved Adobe's objective for it, in becoming a standard for distributing electronic documents. The company says that 70,000 copies of the reader are downloaded every day. The number of PDF files downloaded is uncountable.
Acrobat is not the only standard, however; HTML, XML (increasingly) and, to a lesser degree, Microsoft Word are also popular distribution formats. Adobe is therefore working to enable Acrobat to interwork with all these.
Improvements in version 4.0, for example, include an HTML to PDF conversion utility for harvesting and distributing Web pages, even complete sites. (You can try this out for yourself in a small way; see http://createpdf.adobe.com). Version 4.0 can also export in Rich Text Format but not as well as some of the third-party tools, of which there are now many, for various purposes.
More recently still, Adobe has added further refinements, to help publishers sell their products over the 'Net as well as distribute them on it. One of these is PDF Merchant, server software that uses Xerox technology to encrypt and digitally sign Acrobat files. With this, a publisher can encode documents so that a potential purchaser can freely download a PDF but not open it until he pays to do so.
This is accomplished by another new feature, called Web Buy, built into Acrobat Reader. A beta copy of Acrobat Reader 4.0a, which incorporates this, is available for experimentation from http://cgi1.adobe.com/acrobat/webbuy/wbgetreader.html#win.
With the new version of Acrobat, Adobe is now positioning itself in the "ebooks" market. There it will come up against Microsoft, perhaps the only company presently able to threaten its hold over the document transfer market.
In the next issue of ECW I will be discussing this, along with vanity Web publishing and how Hewlett Packard is trying to slow the retreat from paper.
-oOo-
+++Mahir and Hamsters point up dot.com futility
Can there be anyone in the known universe who hasn't visited the lovelorn Turkish stud, worshipped at a Mahir homage site or tried to forget the oddly compelling image of Mahir by throwing themselves into Dancing Hamsters?
In some sort of acceptance of cosmic futility, the creative genius behind the television advertising for one Dot.Com in North America has incorporated a screen shot of the dancing hamsters into their [its?] advertising. Mahir's site now offers advertising opportunities. People spending millions in pursuit of hits are turning to folks who spent (apparently) nothing to create sites that do achieve millions of hits.
Gold rush fever or maybe it's desperation has taken over the American airwaves. Television advertising, from the most prestigious network slots to the humblest local cable channels, is being dominated by Dot.Coms. While a few are household names, such as Land's End ( http://www.landsend.com) and e*Trade ( http://www.etrade.com), many more are relative newcomers. One suspects that for a high percentage, the IPO Placement Memorandum should have read: "And then we'll spend $1 million on the site, $99 million on advertising and hope to hell we can cash in on Christmas".
No one has really figured out that priceless, elusive commodity site traffic. Or how to drive it with reasonable expectations of predictable results. The Internet might as well be a body of turbulent water for all the sense that "real world" traffic flow tools can make of it. A publisher working in traditional media can launch a new product with, usually, a fairly accurate mini-max set of projections. His mail shot responses will fall within known parameters. Newsstand support will yield predictable results. While there are runaway successes and disastrous failures, these are the expected scattered results at the left and right hand margins of the distribution curve the famous "snake that swallowed an elephant".
Publishers are used to the idea of reasonable forecastable ROIs. No such luck yet for the Dot.Coms. The Internet is capable of almost perfect communication of the "right" message. When I received my Mahirgram from Peter Judge of ZD, Mahir's hit counter boasted about 70 thousand hits. A couple of days later it was over a million and he was negotiating "invatations" to appear on American chat shows.
The cascading power of e-mail and the wonders of exponential growth were at work. If Peter managed to stop giggling long enough to send the URL to ten people, and most of them hit a further ten...and so on. And so the snowball mushroomed, to murderously mix a metaphor. We have seen it before, with hoaxes (Bill Gates wants to send you $235), scams (I get at least five mails a day for the "software *they* don't want you to have") and chain letters for dying children. Think back, too, to how quickly the idea of the animated GIF disseminated.
Most of the Dot.Coms persist in thinking of the Internet as a market, susceptible to the tools that influence a market. But before the Internet was a market, it was a network. It still has far more of the characteristics of a network than of a market. Anthropologists might describe it as some sort of tribal contingent polity. Like a scattered tribe, it is capable of passing certain kinds of information with incredible rapidity to the furthest corners.
Why a message about dancing hamsters (or a Turkish Romeo) might be considered essential whereas information about the possible next President of the USA is considered so inessential that no one visits Al Gore's site is a fruitful question for marketing types to consider.
The South Sea Bubble and Dutch Tulip Mania are still by-words for the speed with which word of mouth can destroy an asset's value overnight. But the ramping up of the asset in the first place was almost as quick and also the result of the same process of communication. The fear of being left out, in one case; the fear of being left holding the baby, in the other. Inclusive vs. exclusive may be another way of looking at the same thing.
The web marketers especially of financial products play much on the fear of being left out on the one hand, and of being taken for a ride on the other. So it's possible to play channel hopper and see one ad for trades from a slicked down e-trader offering a price of $8.00 a trade, followed immediately by one from your friendly High Street bank offering the same service at $28.00.
Interestingly, both make price the frontline story, yet one is selling on the fear of being gouged by traditional brokers while the other sells the comfort and safety of its name. But both are spending big bucks because Mahir-mania and Dancing Hamster magic haven't worked for them.
They are spending money in the hope of driving traffic. Yet that which somehow captures a little piece of the Web's zeitgeist somehow manages to pull traffic. Expect a major thinning of the Dot.Coms in the first quarter of 2000.
Too many of those trying to drive traffic are vainly trying to herd cats.
-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,