What is an idea worth?  More specifically as regards the right idea, at the right time, what is that idea worth to you?

Information technology is driven by ideas.  That posit is a boilerplate definition of cyber/digital technology marketing.

Never has so diaphanous a product commanded so many dollars.  Hardheaded businessmen in skyscraper suites are no longer asking whether customers will ever shop the Internet in sufficient numbers.  They ask instead, how may they improve their e-marketing strategy?

Diaphanous.  No warehouses bulge with inventory.  No concrete-and-steel infrastructure is needed to house offices and products.  Ideas defy shrink-wrap packaging.  Outside-the-box thinking, and the digital capacity of the 'net have achieved a synergy which is powerful beyond the possibilities of either, alone.  Together, they threaten all the historical cornerstones of commerce and sales.

The paradigm has shifted.  More accurately, the paradigm has been transformed; like the shifting of light toward the blue end of the spectrum as it accelerates away from those hide-bound retailers imprisoned by steel-and-concrete offices and factories, and held in the grip of conventional ideas.

Every individual success story on the Internet is the result of the right idea being asserted at the right time.  It is not a serendipitous happenstance: the developmental state of cyber/digital capabilities demand that they be conjured.  And as well, that they appear through the sweat and genius of those entrepreneurs with vision.

Henry Ford, and the assembly line principle, and stronger, lighter steel became available at the turn of the century.  Ford and General Motors were the required outcome.  While Wall Street stock fund managers scratch their heads over which of the e-businesses will become the future equivalent of General Motors and Ford, individual investors pour a deluge of currency into "cyber-tech" stocks.  It is enough to make a traditional stock market economist scream for higher interest rates.

To such an economist, this market has no visible means of support.  The Internet has no infrastructure; no warehouses, crammed with inventory.  But it does know where those warehouses are.  It will continue to try new ideas in an attempt put that inventory in your hands.  All that is required is the right idea at the right time.

The sea-change event of e-commerce came onshore with the crash and roar of a tidal wave.  It has swept the world's stock markets, changing familiar old landmarks of industry until they are no longer the familiar lighthouses and harbors of fiscal safety they were at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

There may be no sure prediction about cyber-tech but for this: whatever happens, its effect will no-doubt be greater than we can imagine.

Do you think the prognosticators of the future economy are correct? Is the e-commerce trend a flash in the pan? Discuss Here

Copyright © 1999 Robert Marcom All Rights Reserved

Robert Marcom is a writer, and the Moderator for Net Author,http://www.netauthor.org/.  Robert's writing credits include both print and electronic publications.  He resides in Houston, Texas.