The luster is gone, but the Internet's overall value is growing. The dot-com meltdown is only a sign that the gee-whiz phase is over. With its passing, there's more money to be made than ever before, providing you understand what is good about the Internet and what it is not good for.
First and foremost, the Net is a distribution system. In fact, it's the best and most far-reaching distribution system we've ever known. It distributes data in various forms: e-mail, e-commerce transactions or intellectual property. And it's multidirectional, meaning you can draw data from any direction.
As peer-to-peer capabilities improve, the flow of data across multiple points means data will be available from virtually everywhere. Mechanisms will be in place in the very near future to sell that data, thus transforming the Internet into an online marketplace for content of every sort.
You can expect it to foster just-in-time distribution, which will either eliminate or expand the grey market for products and components, depending upon how you look at it. It will also allow for more speculation of some components because you will have much better information about such factors as availability and manufacturing capacity, turning virtually every market into a commodities exchange. Just imagine, for example, what the Hunt brothers could have done with better information. The two Texan oilmen gained notoriety back in the 1980s when they tried to corner the silver market, driving the price of silver from $10 an ounce up to $50, sparking a sell-off that eventually undid them. With better information-gathering tools like peer-to-peer search engines, they might have pulled it off.
So what does that have to do with you? First of all, these tools will enable you to determine just how unique your services are and what the going price should be. With some effort, you'll also be able to predict where the service shortages will be and who's worth buying, and it will allow you to perform far better due-diligence searches that will affect your growth.
The Internet is not doing anything that wasn't done before, but increasingly it will give you and your competitors far more insight into how to run your businesses. That also means you can be held more accountable for bad business decisions in the future, and if your company is public, the likelihood of getting sued will increase. Lawyers, after all, will be using the same tools to monitor your market.
Nevertheless, good information can help you grow faster and more consistently than ever before. This is where the Internet is heading, and it can't get there too fast.
