We are truly at the beginning of a revolution triggered by the Internet. Here are some of the effects we already see. Please fill the form below to suggest additions to this list.
 

• E-Commerce:
  • Internet shopping in December 1998 has tripled from the same year-ago figure, a validation that e-commerce is taking off. Several projections indicate that e-commerce will hit $23 billion within 2002.
  • A ".com" in 1998 drew billions of Wall Street investment money and millions of venture capital money for startups.
  • Dell and Cisco report multi-million dollar-a-day sales at their web-stores, a validation of the direct-distribution strategy.
  • Enterprise software companies like Siebel, Vantive and Clarify sell front-end software plug-ins to corporations which have installed enterprise resource planning (ERP) software packages such as SAP, Peoplesoft, J D Edwards etc. Companies like I2 technologies, Manugistics etc integrate supply-chains.
  • The US government has backed off from taxing e-commerce for the next 2-3 years allowing the medium to grow.
  • Software from netbots like Junglee (now owned by Amazon.com) enable comparison shopping and drive prices down on undifferentiated products.
  • On-line financial services (brokerage, banking, loans) has rocketed pioneered by Schwab, E*trade, Citibank and others.
  • Shipping companies like Fedex, UPS & Postal services are gearing for huge growth in shipments powered by e-commerce.
  • Visions: A true interactive medium seamlessly binding corporations to their customers at the front-end and to their suppliers at the back-end on a 24x7 basis.
• Mass Media
  • Hotmail reports its 30 million^th customer -- a base grown in less than 3 years, the fastest customer base growth illustrating the power of the word "free".
  • Real networks report that over 40 million folks have downloaded their real player software for streaming audio and video.
  • AOL, Yahoo!, Excite and Microsoft are vying for a piece of this action through portal and access+content bundles.
  • Success of "You Got Mail" further drives mass media towards Internet.
  • Even in less-developed countries India, cafes and corner copier-service stores are turning into cyber-cafes.
  • This combined with plummeting PC prices, and new forms of access like Web-TV, net-enabled wireless devices (PalmPilot), and platform-independent lightweight software (eg: in Java) will provide the economics for Internet growth.
  • Visions: leveraging this customer base for related value-added product sales/upgrades/targeted advertising & sales(eg: voice email, real-player-plus, consumer device sales, targeted marketing etc). With improved media-coding and streaming, multicasting and quality-of-service (QoS) infrastructure support , streaming applications like TV-like broadcasting will follow.
•  IP telephony, Differentiated data services:
  • Telephone carriers are expected to move from a current business model which has a majority of their revenue from voice services (and data services are low margin and non-differentiated) to a model where majority of their revenue comes from selling differentiated, high-margin data services.
  • Next-generation carriers like Qwest, Level-3 communications, Williams Cos and even ISPs are battling with a resurgent MCI-Worldcom, AT&T and Sprint to provide not only raw bandwidth, but different types of data services -- laying fiber is no longer a barrier to entry given the market potential.
  • Small-scale infrastructure pioneers like Inktomi and Exodus are filling in storage, search, reliability and caching needs of ISPs.
  • Startups like Ciena, Juniper, Avici, Nexabit, Plexis are eyeing the tera-bit transmission and routing equipment business and will compete against the Ciscos and Lucents.
  • Visions: Revolutionary changes in telecommunications infrastructure, data services pricing are expected over the next year or two. IP telephony will become a reality for the masses in the next two years.

Give your suggestions for effects/visions of the Internet revolution:

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