The New World of E-commerce
1. What is E-commerce?
We are all aware of the dramatic growth of the Internet as
well as of the rapid evolution of its technical infrastructure.
The Internet offers a variety of services, of which E-mail
and the World Wide Web (www) are the most popular ones.
Roughly 50% of all adults living in the US access the
web, and the percentage in other regions of the world is rising
very fast.
The Web offers almost infinite options, from viewing
the filmography of your favorite actors to checking stock
market quotations. But from an economic point of view, the
most important and potentially revolutionary service of the
web is Electronic Commerce.
Known popularly as e-commerce, this facility consists in
allowing the selling and purchasing of almost anything, from
almost any place of the world to any other place of the world,
through the Internet.
Now, why do we use the word "revolution" ? This is in fact a
very strong word.
We all heard of the Industrial Revolution (IR). Basically,
the IR was a process of mechanization: doing with machines,
much more efficiently, the same things that were made before
by hand: cotton spinning, webbing cloth, making shoes, etc.
Now, was this really a revolution? It can be argued that
it was simply an accelerated process of improved
productivity. Nothing really new or revolutionary was
present.
Peter Drucker maintains that only the railroads were
the new, revolutionary element in the times of the IR.
Allowing people to get in contact and trade over long inland
distances, the railroads were the facility, which motorized the
rapid, revolutionary changes of the IR era.
By the same reasoning, the advent of the computer was
not revolutionary. The same procedures (invoicing,
accounting, etc.) are performed more efficiently with
computers. Only e-commerce is the really new, revolutionary
facility which will produce dramatic changes in the same way
the railroads did in the 19th. century
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