> >web-consultants. Business is all about trust. How do we enable our
> >clients to establish trust with their prospects? A web site is brand,
> >it could have been put up by a respectable company or be a total
> >scam. Which means brand is all that's left to judge it upon. And where
Remember the warning? Don't by your computer with anything but a
credit card, because credit cards let you return junk within some 30
days. Some even insure it for a year against breakage.
> This is the same problem that small restaurants face in competition with the
> large chains. McDonalds is a brand. It's the same everywhere. One knows what
> one is getting at McDonalds: the very same (tasteless) burger that one got
> But a great little Greek restaurant or a Persian restaurant or many other
> small restaurants can't compete because people won't try them. Small
There is a class of people who go to McDonalds, and a class who go out
for real food. The most profitable McDonalds are in slums, where they are
the only real safe place to go.
> I hate to say this, but I suspect that the web is going to lead to a vast
> homogenizing and centralizing of business.
(Laughing!) Don't count on it!
Yes, it will happen as it did for McDonalds. You will see mass web
retailers, and they will have huge clout. Like IBM did when they put out
The IBM Personal Computer with the cute Charlie Chaplin ads. Those ads
were a lot closer to the truth than you think! Closer even than IBM
thought, but different! The little man is coming back and opening a
little business on the web.
> It's going to kill the mom-and-pop (or two dudes and a Pentium) web sites.
You will also see two gals and a third hand puntium selling hand made
dolls, painted china, and a gazzilion other handicrafts that let them stay
with their families, having fun with their kids and neighbors as they make
handicrafts and small custom things for sale on the web. And you know
what? Their site will tell you how many they can make, and the size of the
waiting queue, because they won't be able to keep up with the demand!
> Manufacturers are realizing that they don't need retailers. Gateway, Dell,
Right! but who are manufacturers? Mrs. Houghton down the street
makes doll clothes, Mrs. Eastern makes stuffed raggedy ann dolls, Mrs.
Sweets makes lolipops that are ... well they may be technically illegal to
sell from home... but she'll do it anyway till some board of health closes
her down. Then there is Jake who builds and paints superb model
airplanes, and Fred who is learning to fly and has a video camera, Jim who
makes little video sequences and longer story tape videos with toys, Tom
who breeds pigeons, Harry who collects baseball cards, Fred who collects
old French buttons, Felicia who paints angels, Mona who's dabbling at
becoming a hooker, and Sabrina who sells... we won't mention what she
sells, but from the rate she is selling them, they probably are not
genuine, or not all hers. And each one of them, if they make something
reasonably unique, will probably get his or her neighbors involved.
They will all hit the web! And hit it harder and harder as the bit
corporations pave the way, just like IBM broke down the wall with the PC,
only to let Dell, Compaq, and everybody else run right under them and beat
them at their own game!
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.
It won't be long before that old "we business folks all have to look
alike" mentality will disintegrate. I grew up in New England, where you
could not get a job in a brown suit, it had to be blue; and in the South,
it had to be Gray. And the women had to dress prim and proper in long
skirts, etc. Now, my father tells me there are women in the shopping
plazas who look like they are wearing his thermal underwear for outerwear.
(They were wearing those in California long before then, Dad!)
We see a growing disparity between people of culture who take pride
in their clothes; and utter slobs, some of whom are dead broke and
homeless, and others... who are flaming geniuses in some narrow specialty
and don't give a hoot that they left half their last meal on their beard
because to them, the rest of the world just does not exist! Some of the
latter may only get out two or three times a year, (visiting their doctors
for a physical due to their sedentary life style,) since everything they
get will be bought on the web and delivered. Even their maids will be
hired over the web! And their doctors will check their blood pressure
logs, weight logs, etc. on their private web pages! (As the local buzybody
tries to crack his crypto on the cable modem.)
As for the homeless, someone here or somewhere mentioned web baseball
teams, with the players getting a hot dog or hamburger for every home run.
Why not! Local sports on the web for all to see. Or give them Shakespeare
to perform in some part for Web TV. Why not, some of them are quite
capable of it, though others... are just brain damaged morons on drugs,
playing the revolving door with prison. I've seen both and all those in
between show up at the local metal recycler dragging in everything from
aluminum cans they stole from the trash cans in the park, to huge chunks
of old ion sputterers use in semiconductor manufacture. And flaming
geniuses and retired tinkerers who frequented those places because they
wanted new (used) toys to play with. Some of those places are on the web
too, I even run a very low volume mailing list for some of them, and have
residual web pages for one of them that got run out of town because he was
attracting too many homeless folks to the area.
BUT... it will only become REALLY homoganized _IF_ the media
companies, the newspapers, radio and TV stations, FAIL in preventing the
cable and phone companies from offering bidirectional services. If you
have to pay to put up each web page, 99.9% of the content won't be there!
But if we DO get full bidirectional service, every kid on the block will
have his own web server, and ten percent of the families will have a home
business on the web. Why? Because the incremental cost of opening a shop
on the web will have fallen to the value of one's time.
Homogeneity? Has TV made the world into McLullan's global village
yet? The media is not, and never was the message; it is the thread that
starts the exchange of rope that bring you the hand carved elephant from
Zimbabwe. In that, the web is no different. Only now, the carver has a
chance to get a decent world class price, rather than hearing rumors that
his twenty five cent statue sold for $150 in a discount furniture store.
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