A Virtual Storefront
The logistics of setting up a storefront in the local strip mall or office building are fairly straightforward, but doing business on the information highway is nowhere near as easy. Indeed, few companies fully understand the various tools and services they could offer, the tradeoffs involved, and the best way to ensure profitable results from their investment. Part of the reason this is more difficult is because unlike in the real world, in cyberspace, you can’t see where you’re going.
If you’re driving down Interstate 95 to attend a meeting in downtown Fort Lauderdale, for example, you can look for—and hope to find—the sign that indicates the desired exit ramp. Even if you get hopelessly lost, you can always pull off the highway, pull in at a gas station, and ask for directions.
Cruise the Internet in search of a program stored on a university computer system, by contrast, and you can spend hours poking about, vainly attempting to summon the exact commands needed without so much as a virtual gas station in sight. Unlike centralized commercial online services such as CompuServe and Prodigy, there’s no toll-free technical support department you can call for help when you get lost on the Internet.
What if you want to put your business on the Internet and access millions of potential customers? If it’s a struggle for you to find information on the Internet, imagine the trouble your customers will have trying to locate your Internet “store.” How will your customers know that you’re even online? Complicating the picture further, the Internet provides a dizzying array of information services that you can offer customers and potential customers, ranging from a simple file and information archives to electronic catalogs to elaborate multimedia documents. Remember that your customers will need to know in advance not only what Internet services you offer but how you offer them. If they send e-mail to an in-formation archive, for example, they may hit a dead end—and go looking for an¬other company that offers more accessible information. These are only a few of the problems involved in doing business on the Internet. Despite the Internet’s massive human and informational resources and its enormous potential as a worldwide marketplace, the Internet is still, to a large extent, an uncharted frontier. Imagine New York City without street signs, the Kalahari Desert without a map, and hieroglyphics without the Rosetta stone, and you’re starting to get an idea of what navigating the Internet can be like if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Don’t despair! There are a growing number of Internet tools and navigational software programs now becoming available that will make it much easier to find the information you’re seeking and where you’re going. If you pack the right tools and learn how to use them, you’ll be cruising the information highway in no time. At the same time, it’s hard to know which Internet services to offer until you know the lay of the land, so climb aboard and let us be your travel guides for this introduction to the Internet and its capabilities.
The rest of this post will focus on the tools and services available through the Internet. When possible, we’ll show you the “nuts and bolts” of what we’re doing; however, the key is not so much to master all the tools but to try to understand how you can use them to enhance your business and offer information to your customers.