Lately we have listened to the pundits and Wall Street bemoan the lack of commerce on the Net. The prevailing wisdom is that the Net will never amount to anything until lots of folks can use it to make money. It's as if they are saying, "if God had intended for humankind to use the Net, He would have made it profitable for us." Wrong. And wrong on several counts.
First, it's not clear that lots of folks won't make a lot of money from the Net. The hardware and software folks were first to the table and it seems unlikely that the content folks won't also have their turn. Second, it is by no means clear that the way to "make money" on the Net is some simple linear extrapolation of current marketing strategies - be they catalogue, advertising or retail-based. And third, and perhaps most important, some of the most valuable things on the Net will not be based on our historic models of commerce.
The Net has, and will continue to have, two kinds of spaces - public and private. Just as some folks choose to vacation in Yosemite and some in Disney World and many in both, visitors to the Net will choose both public and commercial sites. The public sites are doing very well, thank you.
Let's see why. Certainly they complement the early culture of the Net - "Information wants to be free" and other such silliness. A more likely explanation is that they represent intellectual property that is more useful to the owner when given away than sold. They act as a pointer or come-on to some other service that is sold (such as transportation schedules to encourage ticket sales) or they enhance the prestige of the owner. By most measures, they are generally substance-heavy and form-light. Recognizing the congestion on the Net, the attendant slow throughput, and the mostly novice status of the average user, the public spaces are loaded with text and data while generally missing the fancy and cute graphics with which most commercial Web designers seem so enamored. While we can probably expect to see more "push" technology such as PointCast, it will generally be "pushing" material most users will want to see at that particular site. Most public site Web surfers are after information, not entertainment.
The public spaces lean heavily on "community" - the community of scholars interested in high energy physics, the community of folks planning to travel Europe by train, the community interested in sleep disorders. The information in which they are interested is generally factual or pre-screened by some accepted authority, or emanates from a self-selecting set of insiders. It is difficult to apply the word "community" to the group of folks who want to purchase a swimsuit or a new living room couch.
At the height of another period of major upheaval, Abraham Lincoln observed, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present and future. As our circumstances are new, we must think anew, and act anew." For instance, the most successful Net "newspapers" don't look exactly like the daily printed paper - some of the least successful ones do. Some of the most successful are priced, some of the least are not. The issue is not whether to price or not, but rather to post content with information that is valued by some community of users.
We always tend to overestimate the short-term transformations and underestimate the long-term consequences. Similarly, we tend to view new technologies as substituting for the old rather than coexisting and opening new markets for disaggregated and differentiated products. Television didn't replace radio (which appears to be doing just fine these days), but rather opened avenues for different types of entertainment and information. And, radio certainly didn't replace the daily newspaper although the combination of radio and television have significantly eroded the market for newspapers, and created the need for systemic restructuring in the newspaper business.
In the same vein, some folks would have us believe that Net-based learning will supplant campus-based teaching. More likely, both will coexist, with Net-based learning opening new markets in addressing the life-long learning needs of a 21st century workforce. Likely this will cause the same type of restructuring and consolidation in our campus-based institutions that the daily newspaper has experienced. The Net-based learning experiences likely will not look like the typical course found on a college campus. Some may even be "free," choosing to use the learning experience as a pointer to other, priced, services (such as competency-based testing, credit banking, credentialing, etc.) available from the provider.
The community of learners will be a large one, and lots of people are going to make money servicing it - most likely with far different strategies than those of our historic campus-based institutions.