This is something I think many people, including MBA faculties, fellow internet entrepreneurs and others need to remember. The internet is NOT FOR business, it wasn’t intended to be (ARPANet was for military COMCON) and it still doesn’t represent a significant portion of its use.
“That’s absurd, tonnes of business is conducted over the internet!”
True, much business is conducted USING the internet, but compared to other uses of the internet it represents a tiny fraction.
It’s a cliche now that the internet is for porn, but everyone seems to forget that a tiny TINY fraction of that porn traffic is actually profitable business - the rest is just trafficking of imagery.
Bit torrent certainly isn’t a business - its primary purpose as it stands is to subvert business interests not promote them.
Torrents and pornography (and torrents OF pornography) represent a huge swath of bandwidth consumption.
What about other measures? What do people DO on the internet? I can tell you right now that they don’t spend time surfing Amazon or eBay (both of which have session lengths averaging less than 5 minutes).
It is when I read articles like this one at TechCrunch and then read the follow up commentary that I shake my head with dismay over the vitriol classical business people throw at the web and wonder why they bother with the technology at all.
Moreover, the unabashed jealousy they have of people like Mark Zuckerburg is hard to miss. They breathlessly yammer about how Facebook is just some useless fad that’ll blow over and it’s not a “real” business because it doesn’t make “real money” or whatever. Fact is, Mark Zuckerburg is filthy stinking rich, richer than any of the TechCrunch commentators ever will be I’d wager, so he did something right.
The self-contradictory logic they use is pretty easy to spot as well. They observe that a vast majority of web start-ups have a difficult time constructing monetizing strategies for the services - and resort to inelegant brute-force methods like pay-walls, subscriptions or data-enclosure to make a dime. They see this as the only way that business CAN be conducted because it’s pretty much the only successful way business IS conducted.
Now, I hardly take some ranting semi-coherent blog trolls as representative of the epistemic consensus of the business world - but I don’t think the sentiment is a particularly rare one. The question as identified by some of the wealthiest individuals in the world is, “how do we profit from the prevailing forces of the web and internet?”
Microsoft has figured out pretty fast that it’s faced with an innovator’s dilemma when it comes to openness and it’s making serious alterations to its proprietary strategies. Barriers to exit, so called, are at best a happy fantasy that web companies can live in whilst their customer base is ignorant as to how to escape easily. If barriers to exit exist, sufficiently large groups of dedicated people will tear down in seconds.
Business’ can’t bait and switch their customers, they can’t convince them to adopt a product and then punish them for wanting to leave - if that were two people that would be an abusive relationship.
Businesses must CONSTANTLY reinforce to their customers the value of using THEIR services. The value is compared across ALL similar products - since they are all free.
The fact that start-ups can still compete in a market space where undercutting is impossible just goes to show how out of touch the established players are with what consumers value.
Innovate or die is become a brutal truth more and more.
You will retain customers by innovating and empowering your users to take advantage of these innovations through teaching and listening to them in a way that reminds you both that you are indeed human people.