Everything on the World Wide Web looks different.
Once a customer enters cyberspace,
Their behavior will change dramatically. ...
(World Wide Web) A new website appears every minute. When the Internet grows at such an alarming rate, it is obvious that this colorful network, which is interwoven with words, pictures, sounds and actions, will soon become the most important new media after television. In some ways, the World Wide Web is more like a parallel universe reflecting the real world. However, in other respects, the World Wide Web shows its unique characteristics. If you stay long enough, you will gradually find that a brand-new economic system is beginning to take shape in this digital area-which is tantamount to providing us with a new perspective to observe how this information and creative market works. We call it "network economics".
Many enterprises competing to get online may have completely misunderstood the meaning of this new media. After losing millions of dollars, these companies may think that the World Wide Web is exaggerated. Other companies may completely ignore the World Wide Web and be left behind. At the same time, their competitors use the World Wide Web as a tool to steal their best customers. Only by deeply understanding network economics can we avoid such a scene.
Traditional economics is based on the concept of scarcity-human desires always exceed available resources, such as food, clothes and shelter. British economist thomas malthus (1766- 1834) first put forward the hypothesis that the growth rate of population will always exceed the growth rate of food supply. Economists hold pessimistic views on how to allocate such scarce resources, which makes economics known as "melancholy science".
Network economics is not melancholy at all. In fact! The situation on the World Wide Web is just the opposite. Because the network is a rapidly growing intellectual property world, users can copy and download these intellectual property rights without restriction, and the supply of resources in the network world will continue to exceed the demand of human beings for these resources. Network economy not only does not lack supply! On the contrary, it shows a lack of demand. In fact, one of people's major complaints about the Internet is that it has an unimaginable amount of information, which even leads to "overload". On the Internet, the attention of busy computer users is the most limited commodity, and the fundamental battle of network economics is to dominate and maintain this attention.
Therefore, the growth of network economy depends entirely on the quality of information on the network-how interesting and attractive the information is and how to present it! How does information make use of the unique characteristics of this medium? As more and more people love the Internet! They will find that the Internet is worthy of attention, and the World Wide Web will continue to grow at a frenetic rate. Unlike the national economy with limited resources, there is no practical limit to the growth of the Internet. Unlike real estate, steel or even paper! The price of computing power and storage capacity of computers will become cheaper and cheaper. There are countless bits in the online world! There is also an almost endless thirst for valuable information and knowledge.
The World Wide Web is also a borderless world. The actual location of companies operating on the Internet is not important. Despite the government's efforts to control or regulate the world, the network economy will still try to resist this force. Citizens in the online world can freely choose what they want to see and do online. From this perspective, we used to think! A completely free market economy exists only in theory! The global information network makes this economic theory possible for the first time.
The nature of this beast is both good and evil. Because the network provides a wealth of choices! To paraphrase McNealy, president of Sun Company, the competition among companies is a fierce struggle for survival of the fittest. If enterprises on the global information network want to succeed, they must invent some new methods of self-marketing, understand what customers want, and develop some new methods of establishing lasting customer relationships.
There are indeed many opportunities to create new careers on the Internet. However, fear of losing existing business should also be the main motivation for enterprises to go online. It's a bit like the story of two people camping in the jungle. The two men suddenly saw a tiger approaching. One man quickly put on his sneakers, and another man asked, "Do you really think these shoes can make you run faster than a tiger?"
"I don't need to run faster than a tiger," the man replied. "I just need to run faster than you."
In all industries, the World Wide Web is the pair of sneakers that let you run before the drastic power change.
In order to put the principles of network economics into practice, we must first understand the motives behind the four major groups on the Internet, which have settled in the world's first large-scale bit map.
● Customers have tens of millions of people roaming the world on the Internet, looking for unexpected surprises, cheap stimuli, knowledge and entertainment, time-saving services and product information that may improve living standards. They expect the Internet to become their own world, providing tailored information and establishing relationships according to their own needs and wishes. The customer controls the whole situation. Because they can find the best deal in an instant, they won't buy products or services on the Internet unless they come from the most reliable source and are the best, cheapest and most convenient choice.
● Content manufacturers Hundreds of major publishing houses, television companies, film studios and new mixed-race media providers are constantly colonizing the Internet. They design constantly updated pages on the World Wide Web to provide information and entertainment for visitors. According to demographic data, roaming customers on the Internet are very popular with these companies. Therefore, these companies not only want to enhance their brand image, but also are eager to make their websites a profitable adventure.
● Marketers Thousands of companies promote products on the Internet, from food, drinks, cars and trucks to information and financial services. Some companies will use the traditional, one-way outdated thinking mode of the media to advertise on the Internet, promote their products, and then fail. Other companies will accept the new principles of network economy and succeed.
● Infrastructure companies and computer companies sell web servers, while software companies sell some web browser programs and software tools, enabling companies to build beautiful websites. Companies that develop online search engines are in fierce competition, as are dozens of Internet connection providers that provide Internet access. At the same time, advertising companies and thousands of consultants are also opening, tailoring websites for customers. In this digital gold rush, these companies sold pickaxes and shovels. But in the long run, unless the other three groups succeed, they will not succeed.
Everything on the World Wide Web looks different. First of all, once customers enter cyberspace, their behavior will change dramatically. Just as you have different expectations for French restaurants and Mexican fast food restaurants, customers will have different expectations when interacting with internet companies. Customers who enter the website will expect to see tailor-made products and services. They want complete control over their customer data. They expect to have interesting experiences. They expect not only to read advertisements, but also to interact with advertisements and order products advertised.
Knowing how to build a lasting relationship with these demanding customers is the key. One way is to establish a new monetary system. In the traditional economy, the government can control the supply and demand of resources by tightening or relaxing the currency. On the Internet, this power is evenly distributed among thousands of companies. The most obvious example comes from airlines, which have begun to distribute award miles with practical value. A car company website has a similar approach. In order to control customers' attention! If someone is willing to spend an hour learning about the company's new car and answer a few questions, this website is willing to provide this person with online funds worth 100 USD. These 100 points can be added to the customer's "digital cash" account. If the customer decides to buy a car, the money can be used to buy a CD stereo. Such a monetary system helps to ensure customer loyalty, which will become more and more important in the network economy.
Simply put, network economics is equivalent to a new set of economic rules, two new monetary systems and a new customer behavior. We must first look at the origin of the global information network before we can think comprehensively with a correct eye.
The prospect of global libraries
A hundred years later, historians and anthropologists who carefully examine the remains of ancient culture may stumble upon some strange symbols, such as HTTP, WWW, URL and so on. It suddenly appeared in all journals and broadcasts a hundred years ago. They will wonder why the network language penetrated so quickly, or, as some people say, distorted the spoken and written language of that era. "W) in WWW suddenly seems to be the most common consonant in English," said Neil Rudenstein, president of Harvard University. And e (it exists in all words headed by electrons, such as e-mail, e-print, e-journal, e-group, etc. ) seems to have become a multi-purpose and frequent vowel. "
When future historians study our original newspapers carefully, they will see that reports about the World Wide Web appear in the same position next to the news of political conflicts, wars, natural disasters and violence that day. They won't be embarrassed because they don't know what the Internet is, because their research started with the Internet, the next generation technology of information retrieval technology. However, these historians and anthropologists may not understand why the discussion on the World Wide Web appeared so suddenly and instantaneously in the mid-1990s.
In fact, something like the World Wide Web has always been the dream of a few visionaries. 1945 In the summer, when American bombers were preparing to end the world war, an electrical engineer named Wan Nivard Bush was busy planning a global information network loaded with the knowledge of all mankind. During the franklin roosevelt presidential election, Bush, then vice president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, headed the Office of Wartime Science Research and Development, an alliance of 6,000 scientists dedicated to applying scientific breakthroughs to modern warfare.
Germany's surrender is just around the corner, and the Japanese war seems to be over, so Bush turned his attention from global fighting to the enjoyment of global information. In that year's Atlantic Monthly, he published an article entitled "As we thought". In this article, Bush wrote, "Some tools will appear soon. If properly developed, these tools will enable human beings to touch and control the knowledge handed down by human beings over the years. "
He then complained about the problem of information overload, and then clearly expressed that human beings urgently needed something that could control this information. "The accumulation of human experience is expanding at an incredible and alarming rate," he complained. "But to go through the complicated maze that followed and find the very important information item at that moment, the tools we used still stayed in the square sail era."
When Bush wrote these sentences, mankind had just invented computers as huge as warehouses, but the capabilities of these computers were far less than those of today's pocket computers. However, Bush's idea transcends the modern concept of computer. He imagines that computers have the ability to create information "footprints" and connect related words with charts. He mentioned in the article that these information clues can be stored for future reference. Bush believes that the way to organize and collect this information is very close to the way the human brain works, because people often associate one idea with another. He named this easy-to-use and searchable personal knowledge base "Memex".
Bush himself failed to form mature ideas, but he inspired others to move forward with his vision.
Ted Nelson is one of these believers. He is a rebellious boy from Greenwich Village. When he was a freshman at Harvard, he was bent on creating a "discontinuous writing system". A few years later, Nelson published a paper at the meeting of 1965 Computer Machinery Association. In this paper, he called this concept hypertext, and the name came from the prefix hyper-beyond three-dimensional space. Nelson said that a document can contain a set of small built-in programs that can take you to another document on another computer far away. If a document mentions Charles Dickens (18I2- 1870, a famous British novelist), you should be able to immediately connect to all Dickens' related documents, do further research, and then go back to your original place.
In the next 30 years, Nelson spent most of his time trying to build such a system with computer software, so that computer programs could show such magic on the screen. He named this huge project "Xanadu" after Kublai Khan, a poem by samuel coleridge (1772- 1834, English poet and philosopher). In this poem 1797, Sinatra is a magical place of literary memory, and everything here will not be forgotten. So is Nelson's global hyperarchive system. Nelson believes that if everyone has the ability to get all the information, ignorance, political misunderstanding, poor communication and ancient hatred can be eliminated from now on. Simply put, super files can save the world.
"The future of mankind lies in interactive computer screens," Nelson wrote in an article in 1965. "The new writing and film will be interactive and ironclad. All creations will be connected by a bridge, and we need a global network to deliver these works by paying royalties to users. "
(Sinatra plans to embed every byte of data in the address setting, so no matter how long the data is quoted, it will be protected by the system copyright and the reasonable rights that the author should enjoy will be guaranteed. Such copyright design is called cross-inclusion. )
However, like Bush's man, Miss, Sinatra doesn't exist-at least not yet. Unfortunately, Nelson was troubled by serious attention deficit disorder. He has all kinds of ideas in his mind at any time, so his attention can only be concentrated for a short time. Under such circumstances, he seems unable to finish anything in a reasonable time. Therefore, not only did he fail to realize his original intention, but his plan continued to expand, and his ambition was too great for him to bear, which finally led to an inevitable mental breakdown.
John E. Walker, the founder of Autodesk, a successful software company in Silicon Valley, witnessed what happened. He believed in Nelson's dream, so he bought Nelson's technology in 1988 and invested nearly $5 million to develop it. However, four years later, when everyone knew that CERN, the European particle physics laboratory headquartered in Switzerland, had published a very similar software program, the automatic desktop gave up the software development work.
1989, when Tim Berners Lee, a physicist at Oxford University, was 35 years old, he proposed a global hyperfile system called "World Wide Web" when he was working at CERN. His goal is not only to create a universal information space for citizens all over the world, but also to enable people scattered around the world to study large-scale problems together. 19901February, he opened the software that can create, search and retrieve hyperfiles to a small group of scientists at CERN.
Specifically, Berners-Lee completed three inventions: First, he defined the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This protocol is now represented by the ubiquitous HTTP symbol, which is the standard format for all computer query files. Secondly, he created a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). This is a standard. You can search for documents by entering an address (such as www.website.com/document), just like the standard mail format that people use when writing an address. Thirdly, he designed the HyterText markup language (HTML). This is a standard design, similar to the function of word processing software, allowing people to add special programs to documents. For example, one program can mark a sentence as a title in large font, while another program can mark a string of words to link them to another document.
Berners-Lee's imaginary World Wide Web needs these three elements, both of which are indispensable: HTML is used to design and format documents, URL is used to address documents for easy search; HTTP facilitates users to transfer documents between different computers and networks.
199 1 In the summer of, Berners-Lee posted his trilogy program online. Berners-Lee is an energetic man who speaks quickly, but he is clear and single-minded, and only wants to push the World Wide Web to a new technical peak. He compared the early work of conceiving, designing and popularizing the World Wide Web to pushing a sled down the mountain from the top of the mountain. In the mid-1990s, when people's interest in the World Wide Web suddenly increased, he said that he felt as if he had jumped into this sleigh, which sped down the hill at an accelerated speed, while he frantically tried to hold the steering wheel steady. His control mechanism is the World Wide Web Consortium. He set up this group at MIT to advocate the technical and ethical standards of the global information network.
Like Bush and Nelson before him, Berners-Lee was driven by ideal ideas. When the local people invented the World Wide Web, he was determined to build a global super document library, which could at least bring people around the world closer. 1995, MIT held a seminar to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of this influential paper by Bush. At the meeting, Berners-Lee not only paid tribute to the technical foresight of this research, but also expressed admiration for the strong moral sense of this work. Berners-Lee said: "Today, anyone who has read this article in Atlantic Monthly will be surprised by Bush's profound insight and precise vision." "Generally speaking, our desks are full of thoughts today."
But for those who put Berners-Lee's technology into practice, the core of his speech is a huge challenge:
We can access the information, but have we solved the problem? Today, for independent individuals, many things are much easier to do than five years ago. But personally, the global information network has not made much progress in helping everyone build a global team. I also have a dream that the World Wide Web should be less like TV and more like a Wang Yang enjoying knowledge in an interactive way. I imagine this king immersed us in a warm and friendly environment, full of what we and our friends saw, heard, believed or understood. I hope to bring friends and colleagues closer together. By learning this knowledge, we can get to know each other better. If misunderstanding is the cause of most disasters in the world, how can we not clarify it in cyberspace?
Attention struggle
Obviously, the amazing growth of the Internet is not so much driven by the roar of opportunism as by the whisper of idealism. The wishes and hopes of Bush, Nelson and Berners-Lee are indeed imperceptibly guiding the World Wide Web. However, our world is dominated by capitalism, commercialism and consumerism. And the network represents the next stage of these three forces.
Scientists dream of the birth of the World Wide Web and make this dream come true, but the development of the World Wide Web has surpassed the footsteps of these scientists. Just as Bell couldn't imagine all the uses of the telephone, Edison couldn't foresee the rise of the music industry when he created recording technology, and Berners-Lee couldn't specify or even predict how the Internet would change the world. Now, most of the Internet is in the hands of entrepreneurs and consumers, and their number greatly exceeds that of idealistic scientists.
There is a special business opportunity that has ignited a raging fire on the World Wide Web. This opportunity arose because Berners-Lee deliberately omitted a key element when he invented the World Wide Web. He allows PC users to freely choose their favorite "browser" programs. People must use browser software to read all the documents on the World Wide Web and easily jump from one page to another. But Berners-Lee believes that people will want to freely choose various browsers as long as they are compatible with the standards he has set. Therefore, he left the creation of the browser to any interested programmer.
Anyone who knows a little about browser technology will tell you that writing a basic web browser is not a great thing from a programming point of view. There is a cartoon of Dilbert that depicts this phenomenon very funny. One day, Dilbert instructed his colleague Latbert to dance on his computer keyboard, just to deliberately bring some computer bugs into the program he was writing. After Bert mouse finished dancing, Dilbert glanced at the computer screen and said, "I think you just wrote a web browser."
A programmer named mark anderson was one of the first people to see this opportunity. Anderson didn't just write an old browser software. He was 23 years old, just graduated from the University of Illinois and worked in the famous supercomputer center of his alma mater, Urbana-Champaign. He has completed a beautifully designed, practical and interesting browser program, which allows users to point to and bring up documents on the World Wide Web with the mouse, just like Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh. Although the first version of the software can only be used on scientific computers with Unix operating system, the program immediately brought a group of fanatics after it was launched in 1993 1 month. Anderson called this software Mosaic, and put it on the Internet, so that people who want it can download it for free.
Since then, Internet users and websites have mushroomed. When Mercer software first appeared, only fifty computers in the world became hosts for providing network documents. In August of that year, Anderson introduced free Mercer software for Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating system. By 10, more than 500 servers of the World Wide Web had appeared. By June of 1994, the number of network servers had increased to 1 500. A year later, companies, newspapers, magazines, universities and government agencies provided more personal terminals on hundreds of similar computers. Then, in the blink of an eye, thousands of websites appeared.
Compared with the current software, Mercer browser doesn't have many amazing functions. From this perspective, it is like Microsoft's disk operating system (MS-DOS) in the early 1980s. The key point is to establish this software as an industry presumption standard as soon as possible. Then, the programmer can add the functions of the software later.
Jim clark, the former chairman of Silicon Graphics, recruited Anderson and a group of his colleagues in the Supercomputer Center, and then successfully used this free browser to expand investment, making this company the fastest-growing emerging enterprise in history. This story has become a legend in the computer industry. 1in March, 994, Clark flew to Illinois, rented a hotel suite near the university, and then invited the Mercer programming team to come for an interview. He hired all the people and moved them to Silicon Valley within a few weeks. Now, Clark doesn't have to pay royalties of 10 million dollars to the university to buy Mercer software like other software companies. On the contrary, Clark and his geniuses can write a brand-new software from scratch without violating copyright law.
The team speeded up the work to build a better browser. They call this new software and company Netscape. 1in the summer of 995, Netscape's stock went public. Although there is still some time before the earnings report, its share price has hit a record high on Wall Street. At this time, the World Wide Web suddenly became a household name. By the end of that year, the market value of Netscape soared to nearly $4 billion, which was comparable to that of established big companies such as Delta Air Lines and Dow Jones.
Most people believe that Netscape's stock has won such a huge sum of money in one fell swoop because it is obviously committed to monopolizing this important software market. Everyone's theory is that Netscape has the same influence on the Internet as Microsoft's disk operating system and Windows software have on IBM-compatible personal computers. Easy-to-use internet programs are booming, and this company will become the center of this emerging industry.
However, this is only one of the reasons why the market value of this company has soared. Another more subtle reason is that when people log on to the network with Netscape's Navigator browser at any time, their eyes will first be taken to the website whose Netscape is on the World Wide Web. On this website, you can download a series of latest products of Netscape, read the company's financial situation, look at paid advertisements of other websites, and even search all the contents of the World Wide Web. Capturing this forced audience, Netscape is expected to monopolize not only the new market of this software, but also the attention of computer users.
Because of this, the richest people in the world and the largest software company have set the highest priority goal, ready to take a slice of Netscape. Since 1995, Bill Gates and Microsoft have been rapidly launching new versions of Internet Explorer. Of course, Microsoft's browser points consumers directly to their own websites and the contents of the World Wide Web.
By the summer of 1996, product critics had been deeply impressed by Microsoft's version of Internet Explorer, and claimed that this software was at least technically equivalent to Netscape's navigator. So far, Netscape has successfully distributed thousands of free software! Master more than 80% of the market. So Clark decided to start charging customers $49 for new software. However, at this time, Microsoft gave away millions of copies of software and persuaded computer manufacturers to install Internet Explorer on computer hard disks for free, thus gaining this market step by step.
Suddenly, the two companies are fiercely competing for the attention of consumers. At the urging of Netscape, the US Department of Justice began to investigate whether Microsoft used its exclusive rights in the operating system of personal computers to gain the upper hand, which became a famous browser war.
In fact, because this is an important new software market, the browser war will become so fierce in such a short time. However, the reason why this market has become so important is entirely because the companies that provide browsers have the internal advantage of catching customers' attention. This battle of attention just cut into the center of network economics.
Who is roaming on the Internet? Why?
Looking back, it is not surprising that the World Wide Web quickly became the most popular part of the Internet. After the United States Department of Defense established the Internet in the late 1960s, it immediately became the domain of technicians, students and academic researchers. Internet is composed of many independent databases, which is not easy to use. These databases are named Gopher, WAIS, FTP and so on, each of which requires a different instruction set. Internet users need to be proficient in mysterious instructions and profound computer concepts, while users of the World Wide Web only need to click with the mouse.
The World Wide Web doesn't have these incompatible databases, but it pieced together all kinds of information for you-words, pictures, sounds and video clips on an electronic webpage. This website "page" not only allows you to publish ordinary text and graphics, but also can publish illustrated pages. This is why web design on the World Wide Web has become the latest popular art. The World Wide Web itself is called the largest public art project in history. The World Wide Web is easy to use and has aesthetic appeal, which is enough to explain why the World Wide Web has become the most important multimedia business circle and entertainment area on the Internet and is famous for it.
However, what makes people pay attention to the World Wide Web? At first, the World Wide Web was like an amateur radio station, a player's website. In this case, it is a group of software players, scientists, college students, librarians and underground artists who design and browse web pages. People design web pages not to make money, but to impress and entertain others. Some early websites devoted themselves to interactive frog anatomy, comic stories, unpublished novels, scientific drawings and examples of independent music.
According to the first semi-annual survey of Internet users conducted by Georgia Institute of Technology 1994 1 month, during this period, 94% of the users of the World Wide Web were male, and 56% of the users were between 2 1 year and 30 years old. At that time, the World Wide Web was obviously dominated by technicians; At the same time, 88% of the computers owned by Internet users are operated by Uniqlo operating system, which is not easy to operate.
Then, the global information network enters the enterprise. For employees of many companies, the habit of surfing the Internet goes back to.