Commercial Scenarios for the Web: Opportunities and Challenges

Profitability from commercial activity on the Web includes productivity savings, marketing and sales savings, and incremental or new revenue streams. Productivity savings arise from reduction in order and processing costs and more efficient inventory management … Savings result through reduced brochure printing and distribution costs and reductions in order-taking as customers use fill-out forms to prepare their own orders. As control is also effectively transferred to the customer, we speculate that customer satisfaction might actually be increased. Finally, incremental or new revenue streams are available for firms participating in digital commerce, through, for example, online sales, advertising revenues, or information brokering … Corporate training, electronic distribution and maintenance provide additional revenue opportunities for appropriate firms. However, secure mechanisms for transactions are necessary to fully exploit the revenue-generating opportunities of the Web.

Commercial Scenarios for the Web: Opportunities and Challenges

The primary barrier to consumer adoption of the Web as a commercial medium is ease of access … Ease of access is a multidimensional construct and includes high-speed access (the “bandwidth” problem), ease of finding a service provider, and the diffusion of the computer hardware/software/modem bundle into the home. The secondary barriers are ease of use, price, and risk, including such factors as privacy and security. Ease of use includes issues such as the user-friendliness of the software, ease of software installation, and the like. The marketplace will weed out even technically feasible Web applications if they prove too complicated for the average consumer to use. Hence attempts to develop technology that is user-friendly are as important as the development of the technology itself.

RFC1251

The Internet has grown because it solves simple problems in a simple a manner as possible. Putting together a huge Internet has not been easy. We still do not know how to do routing in a huge Internet. When you add the real world requirement of commercial security and the desire for Ôclasses of serviceÕ we are faced with big challenges. I think this means that we have to get a lot more involved with operational provisioning considerations such as those that the phone companies and credit card firms have wrestled with. Hopefully we can do this and still maintain the rather friendly attitude that Internetters have always had.

RFC1251

Researchers from universities, non-profit and industrial organizations are eager to communicate; new applications are being developed which will enable them to interact more and more closely … and will pose the networking challenge of realizing a very large, very powerful Internet.

RFC1251

The Internet is a grand collaboration of over 5,000 networks involving millions of users, hundreds of thousands of hosts and dozens of countries around the world. It may well do for computers what the telephone system has done for people: provided a means for international interchange of information which is blind to nationality, proprietary interests, and hardware platform specifics.

RFC1251

It is unproven that the current technology will survive in a competitive but unregulated environment, with uncoordinated routing policies and global network management being just two of the major issues here. Furthermore, while frequently comments are being made where the publicly available monthly increases in traffic figures would not justify moving to T3 or even gigabit-per-second networks, it should be pointed out that monthly figures are very macroscopic views. Much of the Internet traffic is very bursty and we have frequently seen an onslaught of traffic towards backbone nodes if one looks at it over fairly short intervals of time. I am not sure whether the amount of research and development efforts on the Internet has increased over time, less even kept pace with the general Internet growth (by whatever definition). I do not believe that the Internet is a finished product at this point of time and there is a lot of room for further evolution.

RFC1251

For some years now we have been painfully aware of the scaling problems of the Internet, and since 1982 have lived through a series of mini-disasters as various limits have been exceeded. We have been saying that “getting big” is probably a more urgent (and perhaps more difficult) research problem than “getting fast,” but it seems difficult to persuade people of the importance of launching the kind of research program we think is necessary to learn how to deal with Internet growth. It is very hard to figure out when the exponential growth is likely to stop, or when, if ever, the fundamental architectural model of the Internet will be so out of kilter with reality that it will cease be useful. Ask me again in 10 years.

Web Inventor Berners-Lee Speaks Out on Internet Future

The truth is I haven’t the faintest idea where it is going to be in five years’ time. When the Web as an information space becomes an assumption, then it will be time for the next revolution. In five years’ time the next revolution may have happened on top of the Web. It will happen within the Web. It may be mobile code. It may be robots working for you. It may be people finding ways of interacting politically.

They Made the Web Spun Round the World

In the short term, people will use the WWW as an interface to whatever systems they have, with people taking their traditional EDI systems and running them over their Internet connections. But for the longer term, I hope we’ll see electronic commerce using objects on the Web. Web protocols don’t support such transactions yet.

Patrick Guides Integration of IBM Internet Strategy

The Internet is no longer an academic and research mechanism. Well over half of the Web is now business domains. And I would say that fairly soon, a business without a presence on the Web will be like a business without a fax machine.