Net Benefit : Guaranteed Electronic Markets : The Ultimate Potential of Online Trade

Rating:
Summary: Thinking Beyond the Broadcast Metaphor
Review: Sellers and buyers on the Internet today have rarely ventured beyond the boundaries of print and broadcast metaphors in the Internet medium. While Internet uptake is dramatic, the business revolution has hardly begun. The real power of this new medium lies in its ability to allow the buyer and the seller to connect, communicate and negotiate in a faster, more efficient way. The dramatic rise and fall of "dot-com" companies was very much rooted in over extending the wrong metaphor, and that misconception largely continues.

In Net Benefits, Wingham Rowan has dared to think beyond the traditional broadcast metaphor and consider how marketplaces that exploit this new medium might operate. In their most highly developed state electronic marketplaces would act like the automated exchange behind international currency trading, or the automated exchange recently introduced to the Pacific Stock Exchange. These systems efficiently and impartially match buyers and sellers, and price becomes a function of current supply and demand. The revolution comes in their potential to replace the current marketing techniques designed to exploit the fragmented and inefficient matching of buyers and sellers inherent in paper and broadcast media.

This book forces us to question the attention paid to the recent dot-com model, the new Internet superstores, portals and the struggle for megamarkets. It suggests that perhaps these are just comfortable diversions along the way to the real revolution. Just as the Industrial Revolution grew out of the cottage industries so the new Interactive Revolution will grow from the seeds of atomized capitalism. The use of the web by small and local businesses for local and regional commerce will quietly undercut the current order of mega-merchants.

While the book considers detailed scenarios of how this revolution might impact a number of service areas, it stops short of perhaps the most profound impact, our concepts and opportunities for corporate ownership and investment in this new world. If you buy Rowan's view of the future, one wonders what will happen to a world of personal investment that relies on ever higher profits and stock values of large and growing corporations. Individual and small scale operations do not require the capital ownership or offer the individual growth potential of today's corporations. The stock portfolios of today may begin to look like the castles and estates during the last economic revolution as their ongoing value slips below their cost of maintenance. The dislocation would be as severe as the Industrial Revolution.

Whether the revolution takes the form of guaranteed electronic markets as Rowan envisions, or follows some other variant, is immaterial. The real electronic commerce revolution will be much more subtle in its approach and more devastating in its impact than anything we have seen so far. Net Benefits, at the very least, starts us thinking outside the traditional metaphors.

Rating:
Summary: It could change everything.
Review: This is one hell of a vision. I read Small is Beautiful which was a great idea but not really workable in advanced countries. This guy seems to have worked out how to make "atomised capitalism" more efficient than what we think is going to happen with e-commerce. I can't stop thinking about it.