The day of the roach

Now that Motorola has embraced Java, the incantation brigade that would have us believe that soon you'll prefer to order your groceries over...

Now that Motorola has embraced Java, the incantation brigade that would have us believe that soon you8217;ll prefer to order your groceries over the Internet told us that the grocer is now on the brink of going online. The reason: the trend on the Net to go corporate, fill pages with pretty pictures, jazzy copy, a lot of Java and maybe some virtual reality. A trend that should give consumer goods manufacturers, their ad agencies and their retailers ideas.

Indeed they should. But personally, I see no reason to start doing my shopping on the Net until I can search it to find the cheapest sliced bread retailer in the world we8217;re talking about this obscure bakery somewhere in the Gobi Desert and the hardy entrepreneur is magnanimous enough to sell me a loaf, despatched by special refrigerated container, without charging for shipping.

Since such desperate selling is not about to start very soon, despite the Asian crisis, I think I8217;ll have to stay with my current grocer, who does not have a telephone and firmlybelieves that the Internet is the world8217;s biggest library of smutty pictures. Though the figures for electronic commerce have been rising at a heart-warming rate, the growth has been in the business-to-business sector.

Growth in the retail market is far less impressive, except on speciality sites like the Amazon Bookstore. And notably even Rupert Murdoch, who has the gift of making money out of practically any situation, recently admitted that the Internet looked more like a black hole than a cash cow.

So, some of the hardiest veterans on the Net have been contemplating their navels and identifying the core competencies of the medium. There are two such. The messaging function of UNIX gave the world the cheapest and most dedicated form of communication: email. And the dialup bulletin boards of a decade ago, the prototypes of the World Wide Web, were the first step in creating the world8217;s most accessible central information service.

Today, corporate Intranets function exactly like the bulletin boards ofthe past. They are places where everyone in the organisation can go to access a common pool of information and put up their notices for all to see. The old inter-office memo went from hand to hand, wasting time and restricting information down the line. An Intranet is as good as a general body meeting.

As for email, few people saw its potential when it became commonly available. Hotmail was the first to see that it could be used to air advertising. Today, thanks to mail clients that can handle HTML, advertising is often embedded within the email document itself. Wired magazine sends out mailers to subscribers about their current issue which are entirely marked up. A click takes you to the section of the magazine you want to see.

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Even if every other business venture on the Net comes a cropper these, which use its core competencies, will survive. While it8217;s a bit like claiming that the cockroach is the most successful life form because it can live through nuclear holocaust, but not half as specious.

Thecrucial point is that the Internet is halfway crippled by overload and will remain in that state until the telcos worldwide stop squabbling over how to share business. It is, in fact, a bit like a slow meltdown. In this situation, every content-rich page is an added burden.

At peak traffic times, they just stop loading. Half the pretty picture files don8217;t make it and the whole affair doesn8217;t look half as rewarding any more. That is when email, mailing lists and simple, old-fashioned Web technologies Netscape 1.1 with a little topping begins to look more attractive.

Cockroach technologies, really, but more useful than the hitech stuff. In fact, if I ever find that elusive baker in the Gobi Desert, I8217;ll probably do it through these. He won8217;t be waving at me through some Java window.