A year for e-vending and other punditry

By Peter Sinclair

Between the lines



January is the season of punditry, for raking over the ashes of the old and predicting the shape of the new.

Prophecy is a high-risk industry, but the year 2000 presents fewer difficulties than usual, its chief trend already clearly apparent from the century before. This will be the year of e-commerce.

The figures are coming in. It has been a record holiday season for the disembodied merchants of the net, percentage increases routinely achieving three figures.

Bricks-and-mortar wisdom has always insisted that shopping is enjoyable. But for many people it's not. Routine physical shopping is drudgery; not a rite so much as a penance. Most of us these days have better things to do with our time, for time is the currency of the age.

We are in the first nanoseconds of a Big Bang from which a vast new universe of e-commerce will rapidly expand in the first few years of the third millennium. The interest lies in the form it will take, and here I believe we will see lesser players beginning to challenge the dominance of internet superstores by using a form of collectivisation to unlock the smaller-scale potential of the web.

A group of, say, car-part firms can very easily lease space on a server at a reasonable rate, combining their inventories so that each individual outlet, while stocking standard lines for its area, will also have access to more specialised items which may be available at other stores, while minimising inventory costs.

That this model works has already been demonstrated locally by the five vendors at www.demolition.co.nz, who together combine everything from leadlight and kauri to less romantic bargains in aluminium and plasterboard.

This is also the year in which demands for cheap and accessible bandwidth will become more pressing, and it is not hard to foresee that Telecom will probably be forced to relax its grip somewhat on DSL and other telecommunications products, given the temper of the new Government.

It will be a year which focuses on data security, on privacy and, inevitably, on increased regulation. It will perhaps be the year of Linux and a weakening of the Wintel duopoly, of DVD [at last] and of a micropayment system that has some chance of universal acceptance. It will also, one hopes, be the year that sees free internet access on its way to becoming the norm - a recognition that the web should be a public highway rather than a toll-road.

And it will be another year of hype and IPOs and mega-mergers; AOL and Time-Warner have already kicked off. The totterings and recoveries of the IT tightrope-act will continue; given the frantic pace of technological change, markets can be forgiven a little giddiness.

Let's hope the same applies to punditry ...