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From: Javilk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Bottom line, you will see custom home manufacture gone wild!!! And
>with that, diversity in everything, from Art paintings to shoes. Yes, I
>predict genuine American cobbler made shoes on the web. Cobblers will come
>back, not in droves, but enough. Maybe coopers too... (Wood barrel
>makers.) And there is always the loon with a chain saw who wants to
>become a sculptor. What do they need? A digital camera and some disk
>real estate.
You're really optimistic about the web. It's part of the idea/ideal of
computerization that diversity will grow. But the inherent nature of
computers is standardization. It's digital. Quantified.
The reality is that whereas 30 years ago, anyone could write anywhich way
they wanted (hundreds of kinds of pencils, pens, typewriters, etc., on
hundreds of kinds of paper, in all sorts of different sizes, incl.
personally cut paper), it's now all done with Microsoft Word. Throw in
WordPerfect, AmiPro, vi, and you've got less than ten standard ways to
produce text, all outputed to the same type of American standard white
office paper.
There are some 13 million registered businesses in the USA. About 550,000
are on the web. However, these 550,000 are clustered in only about 2,850
business categories (numbers are based on a white paper that I wrote for a
company last year.) Thus despite the ideal of diversity, there really isn't
that much of it. Only 2,500 categories (and that goes all the way down to
companies that sell industrial dynamite, potato harvesting equipment (2),
reweavers (1), and moss control (1), etc.) for a county with 270 million
people.
The ironic thing is that there is MORE market diversity in the USA than in
Europe or Asia. European corner markets sell about 1,500 different products.
A normal Californian supermarket, such as Safeway, carries about 45,000
different products, most of which simply don't exist in Europe (on the other
hand, nearly everything that one can get in Europe, one can get in a
Californian supermarket.) Thus the number of distinct categories for web
businesses outside the USA will be yet smaller. Globally, we may top out at
5,000 types of businesses altogether.
Thus I'd guess that within the "chick with a chainsaw, a digital camera, and
a website selling carved log sculptures" genre, there may be ten-twenty at
the start, but after a short period of intense web price competition, there
will be only one or two worldwide.
Look at the desktop OS situation. The trend is towards standardization, not
diversification. It's Microsoft (95%), Apple (4%), and Unix (less than 1%).
It's not due to Microsoft's business practises, dumb users, or whatever. If
Linux riot nrrds nuked Seattle and replaced Janet Reno with a chip-embedded
clone, it'd be 95% Linux, Apple 4%, and Microsoft 1%. Just three OS. There
will never be 100,000 distinct OS platforms for the entire future history of
the universe.
Again, the only real business strategy for the web will be for sites to
offer unique products or services to which they hold exclusive rights. They
won't have to compete on price: they can set their price to a global market
of a billion web users.
___________________________________________________
Andreas Ramos [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.andreas.com
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