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Users could be hurtling down a highway with no off-rampsMANY people often ask why Business Times is available online. And is the company moving from physical to virtual publications? And is it going to phase out its hard-copy paper editions? I am no business analyst, but I do have insight into the domain of the information highway, and let me tell you, every business today competes in two worlds: physical and virtual. One has to distinguish between the marketplace and the marketspace. Banks provide services to customers at branches in the marketplace as well as computerised on-line services (such as Beltel and ATMs) in the marketspace. Businessmen must pay attention to how their companies create value in both the physical and the virtual world. Those who understand how to master both can create and extract value in the most efficient manner. Times Media is one of those companies.
I have my own twisted romantic reasoning for why the paper version of the Business Times will not be replaced by an online counterpart. One is that it is not so lekker to sit on the toilet with a laptop. And another is that you can't swat a fly with a laptop. Seriously, paper has been around for a long time. I don't think a mere digital revolution is going to change the world that fast.
Before we discuss online information sources, let's put the Internet into perspective. The Net is another communications infrastructure. It is an alternative to the telephone, the fax, the postal system and the roads. The value of the Internet lies in the organisations that use this infrastructure. Many people describe the Internet as an information resource. This is not the case: Business Times is an information resource. The Internet merely allows you to read Business Times online (www.btimes.co.za). If the Internet was a database or a library then Telkom and the post office would also be databases. In fact, Telkom simply connects people and organisations to the telephone network. It does not provide the content. No one can blame Telkom for a bad conversation.
Information-based businesses are the most conducive for online service provision. Media, finance, entertainment, education and other information-intensive industries fall under this category. This is why Times Media has embraced the Net and why the online world has become so useful.
But the question remains: are companies like Times Media changing their distribution model? In my opinion, the only thing that is changing is that these type of companies will grow and become more powerful. The Web allows an information publisher to add tremendous value to its core products. And this leads to growth - which means a profit increase. A new breed of on-line services is being born. These services are interactive, real-time gems that will allow us to search, order, query and generally do things that were never practical in the world of paper and filing cabinets. One cannot phone up a newspaper and ask its library staff to search for all the issues in 1996, for example, that dealt with the topic of the Internet. They simply could not provide this service at a price that you would be prepared to pay. And who is going to run around printing out back issues? And who will pay for these to be couriered across town? Computers have always been good at storing and retrieving information. The Net allows a company to make information available that was simply too expensive to deliver in the physical world. Times Media, for example, offers services that allows one to search for articles from back issues on its Web site. The company will ultimately derive new revenue from this online initiative.
The media, stockbroking, insurance, banking and entertainment firms of the world are all scrambling to launch on-line worlds. Exciting Web sites have been launch by Disney (www.disney.com), Nedbank (www.nedbank.co.za), First National Bank, (www.fnb. co.za), Absa (www.absa.co.za), Sanlam (www.sanlam.co.za), Liberty Life (www.liberty.co.za), Time Warner (www.time.com), CNN (www.cnn.com), and many more. But there is also a new generation of online services that has surfaced. These are from entrepreneurs who saw a gap in the marketspace and produced a search engine. Many people are lost in cyberspace looking for their favourite blue-chip organisation's online offering. So they turn to a search engine to point them in the right direction. Just like the telephone system has the Yellow Pages, so the Web has Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com), Lycos (www. lycos.com), Alta Vista (www. altavista.com) and various other search engines. South Africa has a search engine, Ananzi (www. ananzi.co.za) that is dedicated to this part of the globe.
The Web part of the Net is dedicated to publishing information and providing interactive, online services. Companies use the Web to add value to their physical offerings and to provide a new generation of services that are quick, cost-effective and multimediaenriched. Without the world's blue-chip organisations setting up shop on the Web, the Net would be a highway with no off-ramps, and we would be driving, er, surfing, aimlessly looking for a way out. Thanks to these corporations setting up Web sites, cyberspace is looking a lot more promising.
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