December 21, 1995

The shakeout is coming. Logical trigger factors: Normal correction in tech stock prices, one or two key site failures (Pathfinder?), real cost per customer analyses.

Nobody bothered to really think out the operation and maintenance costs of a website, so *lots* of small sites sit idle because they can't be maintained. The push for huge traffic volume, based on the premise that traffic *might* equal revenue, has distorted website design into an esclating outrageousness contest. Journalists, keenly aware of the Web's potential to replace them, embraced the technology resulting in an astounding hype spiral. Electronic commerce has, shallowly, been defined as retail transactions.

The shakeout is coming soon, and for good reasons. It won't be the death of the web but a scaling back to more reasonable proportion.

What good is the web?

The employment industry seems to be getting it. About 2500 to 3000 employment firms (headhunters, staffing agencies, temp companies, recruiters, etc) have ventured on to the web in some form. Another 1500 or so corporations have moved parts of their employment functions online. The Altavista newsgroup inventory has about 450,000 job postings. (In the past six months, the Dejanews inventory has peaked at over 500K).

To put these numbers in perspective, there are only 30,000 American employment firms. So, somewhere between 5 and 10% of the industry has begun to use the web. Allowing for huge volumes of multiple postings, there are at least 100K jobs offered at any point in time over the past six months. *And*, the bias towards computer types isn't as large as you might guess.

The web is good for starting relationships, for linking. As the economy continues to projectize, with corporations getting smaller, movement between assignments requires decentralized facilitating institutions. And, it requires context for those transactions. In this regard, the web is nearly perfect.

Reducing business to business transaction costs has been the holy grail of EDI and similar initiatives for decades now. The Web really does offer the potential to bridge the myriad "islands of automation". It also appears to be effective in the reduction of internal transaction costs. By enabling standard document formats (Acrobat et all), inter-organizational communication of status, budget, schedules, proposals, problems, etc has been istantaneously cleansed of the last 20 years of technical broohaha. Expect the web to be championed as a travel cost reducer.

Organizational theorists and IS managers have been tackling the problem of the intersection of personality and information from opposing perspectives. Automating Sally's special vendor approval form always put Sally at risk. With internal webs, information systems are beginning to be less sterile and more like the organizations they're supposed to support.

The future of the web is only partly a publishing/television experience. To a large degree, the web will be successful to the extent that you don't have to use it alot rather than the viewing/reading model. The viewing/reading model assumes that success equals a greater amount of time spent on the web.

Around our office, we say that the best website gets you off the web the fastest. Ultimately, the web's effectiveness will be delivery of the right information and the right relationship at the right time.

It's about linking.

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