Internet Commerce

For innovators and hackers, phase one of a technological breakthrough is the most fun. It's like watching a dancing bear. That the bear dances at all is a miracle, and no one asks how well. People are excited that something--anything--works. Early adopters throw money at it and spend little time asking about what they're buying. Fifteen years ago, personal computers were in phase one.

Phase two is where the work usually gets done--the innovators have to produce real results. Realists begin asking where the money is going, and the accountants want to know if the bear can dance the mambo and a cha-cha. That phase was the PC industry in 1990. MIS directors started asking ugly questions about price/performance, and prices started falling.

Phase three is full industry maturity. The bean counters wonder whether they're getting anything for all this money. The fun dries up. Hackers find another phase-one innovation to promote. The bear has to dance better than ever, for less money, before a larger and more critical audience. That's the PC industry today; you can buy a whole machine for less than what 2MB of RAM cost in 1984, but most of the fun of pioneering is gone.

Right now, the Internet is entering phase three, and Internet commerce is somewhere between phases one and two. A few Internet-based businesses have wrestled the available software into shape and are selling products worldwide to anyone with a browser, a credit card, and a pioneering spirit. But the online community still has to answer some big questions: Can retailers secure information on the net? How do retailers verify a customer's identity? How can retailers keep people from duplicating the software they download? Can retailers provide online commerce with Windows NT? How much of the online work should retailers do in-house and how much of it should they contract out? And, will the Internet support commerce?

Internet Commerce Expo
In September, I went to the Internet Commerce Expo (ICE) in Anaheim, California, with these questions in mind. ICE was for the small guy interested in doing business on the Internet--it didn't cover Internetworking and Internet communications.

But just Internet commerce is scary enough for a beginner, who has plenty of new concepts to assimilate. The companies involved don't always help you comprehend their ideas, and they seem to think they're household brands. This belief is a common malady during the early days of any technology. Attitude was the only answer I got to many of my questions. I nearly fell into a Mel Brooks routine and ran around asking, "What is it? A product? A service? An API? An initiative? What?" Each company has been developing its own product for so long that it can't tell you why you need it.

Another problem was the premature death of paper. Many companies had no printed information. They expect you to search their Web sites--and I do mean search. When I asked a Silicon Graphics (SGI) representative for more information about the company's Cosmo MediaBase video data-streaming product (viewable on NT soon), he wrote www.sgi.com on a sticky note. When I asked him for a more detailed URL on a piece of paper I wouldn't lose, he seemed insulted. Please, if you're developing some Internet-related item, remember that paper doesn't crash and is never inaccessible. The Internet is a wonderful place to find all manner of product info, but it's a supplement, and not the only delivery method.

Electronic Commerce: The Internet Replaces Classic EDI
For the past five years, electronic commerce has meant electronic data interchange (EDI). Big companies use EDI to order products and settle bills over private networks.

Some companies have started taking baby steps into using EDI standards over the Internet. But private-net EDI has several advantages over Internet commerce: Private-net EDI is secure, it exists now, and it's not subject to Internet congestion or failure. Of course, such an independent network requires separate maintenance and works only with companies that are already connected. End users do not have access to EDI because it occurs company to company. Commerce on the Web may not be as refined as EDI, but Internet-centric business solutions are coming.

Every emerging technology needs standards, and much of the Web's success comes from the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Most secure Web communications standardize around Secure HTTP (SHTTP) to transfer information from a Web server to a user. In turn, many commerce solutions, such as Terisa Systems's Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol, are built on SHTTP. Visa and MasterCard have both adopted SET for transferring credit card information from browser to server, through a SET browser plugin.

For the browser plugin to work, it must connect to a secure server. O'Reilly & Associates took the opportunity at ICE to announce that the next version of WebSite Professional, the company's Web server software for NT and Windows 95, will support Terisa's SecureWeb Documents service (which also uses SHTTP). This service lets you securely transfer any document, not just credit card numbers, over the Web.

One vendor at ICE in platoon strength was Netscape. Perhaps the company made such a show of force because it has decided that Microsoft's number one priority is to kill Netscape (by the way, Microsoft didn't show up at ICE).

Netscape has announced three major initiatives in the past few months: Open Network Environment (ONE), a framework to connect server components, including third-party parts; ONE server, Netscape's Web server suite of components that directly competes with Microsoft's Normandy; and Navio, Netscape's embedded Web initiative to put Web browser technology into everything from microwaves to TVs.

At ICE, Netscape built on ONE by announcing AppFoundry, which highlights and promotes Internet-oriented applications you can buy from big-name companies instead of building them yourself. Not coincidentally, these apps all run on Netscape's products. AppFoundry makes in-house developments such as travel and expense reporting, decision support, training enrollment, and inventory management applications available as real-life Internet products. AppFoundry support includes official online discussion groups, which were lacking from Netscape in the past. Most AppFoundry products are cross-platform, so you can use them on NT, provided you use Netscape's server.

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