| |
The
change from traditional to WWW publishing is changing
the way we conduct business. The volume of sales generated on the World
Wide Web in 1995 was around 436 million dollars. By 1998, it is
forecasted to increase more than hundred fold to 46 billion dollars !
In this document, we provide our clients unfamiliar with the
internet with a brief look at the internet, its terminology, and its advantages.
The document is largely geared towards our corporate clients. It covers the
differences between the WWW and traditional publishing and processing
media (with respect to access, costs, dynamism, and interactivity); the growth
of business conducted on the internet; how companies actually use the
WWW (including how the WWW solves the largest problems facing corporate
client/server computing applications); and forecasts about the future of the WWW.
Basics and Terminology
WWW stands for "World Wide Web." The WWW project, started by
Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics),
seeks to build a "distributed hypermedia system." In practice, the web is a
vast collection of interconnected documents, spanning the world.
The advantage of hypertext is that in a hypertext document, if you
want more information about a particular subject mentioned, you can
usually "just click on it" to read further detail. In fact, documents can
be and often are linked to other documents by completely different authors
-- much like footnoting, but you can get the referenced document instantly!
To access the web, you run a browser program. The browser reads documents,
and can fetch documents from other sources. Information providers set up
hypermedia servers which browsers can get documents from.
The browsers can, in addition, access internet files other than WWW files. Other access methods
include FTP, NNTP (the Internet news protocol), gopher,
and an ever-increasing range of other methods. On top of these, if the
server has search capabilities, the browsers will permit searches of
documents and databases.
The documents that the browsers display are hypertext documents.
Hypertext is text with pointers to other text. The browsers let you deal
with the pointers in a transparent way -- select the pointer, and
you are presented with the text that is pointed to.
Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext -- it is any medium with pointers
to other media. This means that browsers might not display a text file, but
might display images, or sound, or video, or animations.
Differences between the WWW and Traditional Media
- Geographical reach:
WWW: The web provides literally world-wide access. It enhaces globalization of company by instantly globalizing the company's markets.
Traditional: With traditional publishing media, your access is always geographically limited to where you decide to distribute or air your message.
- Cost of access:
WWW: The web provides year-round, 24-hours a day access to your company by your customers and business partners. The cost of reaching additional parties is zero. There is no additional cost to a "2nd printing and distribution" of your message.
Traditional: With traditional media, you pay for extra printings, extra airings, new billboard locations, etc.
- Flexibility:
WWW: The web provides for dynamism of your message content: It is easy and relatively cheap to update information as the needs of the company or the content of the corporate message changes.
Traditional: The traditional media are static: It is costly and more difficult to revise the content of your printed or aired message.
- Interactivity:
WWW: The web is interactive. The web page dynamically responds to different target viewer's interests by providing them the information they need.
Traditional: The traditional media are non-interactive. The message is a priori set in print or video. And the message must be fixed for a given target market.
How many hits do websites get
In the U.S., corporate sites get anywhere between 1,000 to 1,000,000 hits
per month. Smaller sites of interest to geographically or topically
limited market segments may end up getting as few as 1,000 hits per year. A
manufacturing firm with worldwide markets falls into the first category while
a local "bed & breakfast" facility falls into the second category.
Regardless of the target markets, the number of hits depends on:
- the relevancy of the information the website content offers,
- how interesting and organized it is to attract firstcomers,
- whether it is maintained and updated regulary with relevant information to make
the visitors come back for new information, and
- on how heavily the presence of the website is publicized.
Business on the net
Back in old days, before 1990 or so, there were no markets in the virtual
community. If you wanted to buy a book, you still had to jump in your
car and drive to the nearest bookstore. This was because in those days,
the internet consisted mainly of a series of government-funded networks
on which explicit commercial activity was forbidden. Today, much of the
internet is run by private companies, which generally have no such restrictions.
Many companies have begun experimenting with "online shops" or other
services. In fact, a majority of the websites are now commercial/corporate websites.
Many of the shops on the net are run by manufacturing firms, software
engineering companies, booksellers, and newspapers, while the services provided on the
internet range from delivery of indexed copies of legal documents to an online stock broker
that hopes to entice you to subscribe to any of several economics publications
(of the electronic or printed-on-paper variety). A number of companies
also use "Usenet newsgroups" to distribute press releases and product information. With the
emergence if the "Intranet" technology, the trend is towards many organizations setting up
their own enterprise-wide Internet or Web system where the employees can post or retrieve
company news and information, work in process, and progress reports.
Total commercial activity on the internet and on other networks, such
as CompuServe, with its Electronic Mall, or Prodigy, with its advertisements
on almost every screen, is phenomenal, with sales generated on the web
currently exceeding $3 billion dollars per year, and expected to climb to
46 billion dollars during 1998. Companies are increasingly becoming aware of the
potential of the web and investing large sums in Website development. According
to analysts, an organization typically spends between US$ 100,000 and
US$ 2 million to develop a Web site, and up to half a million dollars a
year to maintain the information and keep it up-to-date.
Conducting business on the internet has not been smooth sailing. Companies
worry about such issues as crackers getting into their system over the
network, and many customers do not like the idea of sending a credit-card
number via the Internet (an e-mail message could be routed through several
sites to get to its destination). These concerns have largely disappeared
as Net users turned to such means as "message encryption" and
"digital signatures."
How companies use the WWW
The following are some examples of how companies with successful
internet or intranet web presences use the web:
- 1. Advertising
- Showcasing the company's product lines,
- 2. Public Relations
-
- Promoting affiliation with the compny through:
online corporate partnerships,
customer support pages,
showcasing innovative, solutions-oriented product uses/applications,
accepting public submissions to on-line company magazine,
online raffles/drawings,
direct, topic-specific e-mail notices to interested customers.
- Making product announcements
- Distribution of press releases to "usergroups"
- Online corporate annual report
- Virtual tour of the company
- Event support : Special pages for events participated in by the company or organized by the company.
- 3. Direct sales
- Secure, online purchasing opportunities for wholesale and/or retail customers,
Product catalogues,
Automated online price quotes for complex projects,
Product specifications,
Warranty/quality/safety information.
- 4. Operations Management
- a. INTRANET applications: "Internet" within the company
Provides all documents to all (authorized) staff or customers instantly, under security.
Inter-company video conferencing and mail technologies
- b. EXTRANET applications:
- Distribution/Logistics/Inventory applications:
where suppliers and/or wholesailers/distributors access and/or update company databases
- Forecasting support applications
(for "Bottom-up" sales forecasting - driven by distribution/logistics feedback from wholesalers),
- Training & Certfication applications
for training personnel or distributors away from company headquarters
Typically, organizations make use of architectures based on
Three-Tier "Intranet" Designs
to implement direct sales and operations-related applications. And increasingly,
we see companies setting up their own private Corporate
"Extranets" for EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) with their
trading partners.
Our prospective clients who may not be aware of the wide range of corporate
Web site quality on the WWW should also consult our examples of The Good & The Bad
(but not The Ugly) of the Web.
Is WWW a passing fad?
To answer this question, let's look at some variables that are reliable
measures of the growth of the internet and the WWW. The number of hosts
on the Internet has roughly tripled in the time from January 1994 to January 1996.
| Date | Hosts | Domains | Replied to Ping |
|---|
| Jan 96 | 9.5 million | 240,000 | 1.7 million |
| Jul 95 | 6.6 million | 120,000 | 1.1 million |
| Jan 95 | 4.9 million | 71,000 | 1.0 million |
| Oct 94 | 3.9 million | 56,000 | 1.0 million |
| Jul 94 | 3.2 million | 46,000 | 0.7 million |
| Jan 94 | 2.2 million | 30,000 | 0.6 million |
| Oct 93 | 2.1 million | 28,000 | NA |
| Jul 93 | 1.8 million | 26,000 | 0.5 million |
| Apr 93 | 1.5 million | 22,000 | 0.4 million |
| Jan 93 | 1.3 million | 21,000 | NA |
|
The WWW has grown very fast. In fact, the WWW has grown substantially
faster than the Internet at large, as measured by number of hosts. The rate
of the web's growth has been and continues to be exponential, but is
slowing in it's rate of growth. For the second half of 1993, the Web had
a doubling period of under 3 months, and even today the doubling period is
still under 6 months. |
"There are 27,000 Web sites, and this number is doubling every 53 days."
I read this statistic in someone's email signature, and found it mind-boggling.
They had had gotten the figure from Business Week, which in turn was quoting
someone at Sun Microsystems. (The figures were supposedly true on or about February 20th, 1995).
Here are more reliable statistics:
| Month | # of Web sites | % .com sites | Hostnames
per Web server | Replied to ping
per Web Server |
|---|
| 6/93 | 130 | 1.5 | 13,000 | (3,846) |
| 12/93 | 623 | 4.6 | 3,475 | (963) |
| 6/94 | 2,738 | 13.5 | 1,095 | (255) |
| 12/94 | 10,022 | 18.3 | 451 | (99) |
| 6/95 | 23,500 | 31.3 | 270 | (46) |
| 1/96 | 100,000 | 50.0 | 94 | (17) |
| 6/96 | (est)230,000 | 68.0 | 41 | NA |
| 1/97 | (est)650,000 | 62.6 | NA | NA |
And some interesting WWW statistics:
- Number of Internet Service Providers, worldwide (July, 1996): 3,054
- During 1996, percentage of 1-800-FLOWERS'S online sales that came via the Web: 55
- Estimated volume of sales generated by the World Wide Web in 1995 (in millions of dollars): 436
...Estimated volume of sales generated by the World Wide Web in 1998 (in millions of dollars): 46,000
- Estimated total Internet advertising revenues in 1996: $266.9 million
- Advertising revenue on the Web in the third quarter of 1996, in millions of dollars: 66
- Percentage of ads containing URLs in the first 20 pages of Good Housekeeping (March 1997): 54
- Percentage of the first 20 ads in the October '96 Scientific American with Web addresses: 75
...Percentage of the first 20 ads in the October '96 Scientific American with toll-free numbers: 70
- Number of hits on boston.com during the blizzard of 4/1/1997: 3,123,787
- Approximate number of new domain name registrations, per month: 85,000
- Number of business listings of Web sites in the Commercial Sites Index: 15,379
...Average number of sites added to the Commercial Sites Index, per day: 73
- Number of people who worked on the NFL's Super Bowl Web site: 35
- Approximate number of entries in the 1996 Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists: 1,700
- Number of major corporate Web sites surveyed for e-mail capabilities by the Wall Street Journal: 24
...Percentage of those sites that never responded: 38
- Estimated number of adult Americans who use the Web daily: 9 million
- Percentage of revenue Cisco Systems hopes to be processed online by July, 1997: 30
|