They say that the World Wide Web is amazing. I'm the first to subscribe to this point of view. I don't know of any technological innovation that has had such a positive impact in such a short time and on such a global scale. This being said I have the feeling that there is some exaggeration in all the healing properties the Web is being credited with.
Web sites first. Everybody wants one, even if only to display family pictures for the whole world to see. Even the smallest company nowadays has its own site, sometimes with no obvious commercial benefit. Web sites are often seen as just another advertising billboard, which they are not.
Billboards - or any other media-based advertisement - come to you, but you have to go to a web site. Unless you publish your ad in a major search engine like Yahoo for example, and pay substantial money for it, your own web site cannot replace traditional advertising. And if your site doesn't contain interactive, dynamic material that will keep the visitor coming back for more, the benefit, whether promotional or commercial is far from being obvious.
E-shopping and e-commerce require as much skill from vendors as regular business does, if not more. And competition is everywhere, in the street and on the web.
It is also curious to read in the news that some developing countries that have been more or less closed to the external world so far expect to achieve major improvements on both social and economic levels merely by allowing the Internet in. Giving people access to Internet is vital but surely cannot be the answer to all difficulties. The Web is not the aspirin of the electronic telecommunications age.
The benefits that personal computers have brought to us since the early eighties are overwhelming. But they cannot be expressed with figures and they have not explicitly, directly solved economic problems. In some cases they have even made employment worse.
Internet is no better. We definitely need to push the IT drive as far as we can and we do need faster Internet connections. But it would also be wise to be realistic, not to give Internet more credit than it deserves and not to escape from real life problems by believing, or making people believe that the Web is a miracle medicine that is going to solve all or most of our problems. ― (Jordan Times)
By Jean-Claude Elias
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