With a few far-sighted exceptions, business is as slow to wake up to the new as human beings are. When it does, however, it devours it. A handful of early movers turn it into a competitive advantage, one that they enjoy only as long as it takes for everyone else to catch up. Then the new becomes commoditized, a sine qua non, and the field is levelled once again. That has been as true for communications technology as for anything else, perhaps more so - business has turned the telegraph and the telephone, the telex and the fax machine to its purposes. Now it’s the turn of the internet and all that flows from it. But some believe (the most dangerous four words in the English language, others say) that ‘this time it’s different’.
Ideas about the communications possibilities of packet-switching and networking surfaced at MIT in the early 1960s, and the first network with computers communicating over a phone line was built in 1965. But it was the 1980s before business began to scent possibilities, and the first Interop trade fair showcasing the internet was in 1988. The internet is the underlying, enabling network, but business was more interested in the applications you could park on top of it, notably the e-mail messaging system and the web, which shares information by using browsers to access web pages. Companies quickly cottoned on to the virtues of e-mail as a communications medium, though its use as a marketing channel has been impaired by floods of spam. They, and their customers, were more tentative about the Web and many inaugural corporate web sites were information-only. It was in the more sheltered environment of business-to-business transactions that e-commerce first began to get traction.
