The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

Specific questions include:

• What implications does the Grid have on the future of online business and online shopping?
• What business potential is there in having a much faster internet?
• How could the Grid help business in general, and which specific businesses could it help?
• What can businesses do to prepare for the Grid?
• What kind of resources and organization would be required for the Grid to truly replace the Internet in the world's households?
• Will the Grid really be able to take root and displace the Internet?
• How would governments regulate the Grid?

However, as one NextStageologist often says, "You gotta feed it" and another "Sometimes you just have to let the fool be slapped", so...

• What implications does the Grid have on the future of online business and online shopping? What implications did the wheel, steam, internal combustion engines, nuclear power, electricity, take your pick have? Many and varied and as yet undeterminate. It will provide more information faster. Oh, yippee. I didn't have enough information coming at me already, as if I wasn't already sipping water from a firehose. Does this mean I'll get my emails faster?

  You want to really impress me? Give me back all that time I'm saving with a faster internet as moments in the sun, lying on a beach with my wife, playing with my children, talking with friends. Or even better, I'll trade you one hour of faster internet for software that actually does what it's suppose to do (I'll return to this later).

• What business potential is there in having a much faster internet? Business potential? No idea. Information exchange potential? Lots. Of course, the more information that's exchanged the greater the possibility of cultural fractionalization. Not offering that that's a good or bad thing, merely an aspect of any evolution.
• How could the Grid help business in general, and which specific businesses could it help? It will most directly benefit businesses that can afford to use it. There was talk a while back about a premium internet for companies that could afford the associated advertising and an no cost internet for most people. It would be like having everyone now on cable to go back to dial up. I wonder if this is the old dog with a new trick?
• What can businesses do to prepare for the Grid? It really won't matter. They'll be as prepared for the full implications of this as they were for the invasion of the 'net back in the mid to late 1990s.
• What kind of resources and organization would be required for the Grid to truly replace the Internet in the world's households? According to the articles KMM sent along (and offered as links at the bottom of this post) lots more infrastructure, lots more power, lots more of lots more.
• Will the Grid really be able to take root and displace the Internet? Has the internet done away with telephones? Newspapers? People will always want to communicate to each other and this will offer another way to do it. The old methods change to match new distribution technologies and that will remain the same throughout all time.
• How would governments regulate the Grid? About as well as they do now, I think.

More powerful, faster better, it can do so much more and dear god, please don't let it

This news about The Grid wouldn't be so ludicrous to me if I hadn't received the following today. Somehow it all seems to fit...

First, I downloaded the file from the Axxxx website. Fortunately, I have a high-speed connection, one of those 5M up, 10M down things so the download only took six days. I let it sit on my hard drive for a while because I had some other things to do and didn't want to play with it until I knew I had some dedicated down time to put to it (fair shake and all that).

Well, today was that fair shake day. I clicked on the down load, answered a few questions and it got to work.

Okay, it didn't quite get to work. It didn't seem to like the special directory I set up for it. You know, a place where all it's files could go so I could easily get rid of them if I decided I didn't like the product? Finally I convinced it and it did go to work.

Well, not quite. What it did was unbundle or unpackage itself. Thank god I still had 160G of my 200G drive left. Unfortunately, it didn't install itself, all it did was install the install program that it needed to install Dreamxxxxxx itself. Not to worry, that's why I had that other 800G drive for. I think.

So I answered a few more questions and it installed itself. And about 6 other things that I didn't know it needed to install to get anything done. All I wanted was Dreamxxxxxx, not Nightmare, but so it goes. And then my firewall starts going nuts because Dreamxxxxxx wants to talk to somebody somewhere about who knows what and I put a kebosh to that.

The installation program itself was very smooth, I will admit. I wasn't sure how long it would take and fortunately I had War&Peace, I, Claudius, the collected works of Shakespeare and Churchill's six book series on the WWII to keep me occupied. That and a deck of cards.

I finally did get Dreamxxxxxx running. I decided to start off with one of its templates. Of course, it wanted to know where to store its files. On an http site somewhere. So I set one up in the office. It didn't like that -- oh, I forgot that it wanted to become the default application of all sorts of different kinds of files, some of which I didn't recognize -- and it wanted to know about CFM, ASP, JSP all sorts of other server technologies.

All I wanted to do was see if Dreamxxxxxx could help me design pretty sites.

So I got it to work with the http server I set up in the office. Then it wanted to know where to save some other files. And some other files. And these files. And those files. And how about these other files. Then there were those completely different files. How about if I just start sucking up resources making up files. Got a noteboard on the wall? Can I save some files there?

Then came the tutorial. Which Dreamxxxxxx couldn't find. Neither on my computer nor on the web.

And I didn't mention the interface. I did get a chance to look at it for a few seconds. What I've come to appreciate is that there's a good reason I don't fly planes. They're complicated and I'm not. There's a reason the charts and graphs we produce are so simple. It's so morons like me can understand them.

There is value in "pretty", I guess. Also in hype. I've concluded that there's some pretty good hype out there.

So I'm uninstalling Dreamxxxxxx. I started a little while ago. Unlike our current President, I don't plan on declaring victory until I know every last Dreamxxxxxxish bit is gone from my machine. Don't want no insurgencies cropping up someday when I least expect it.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Links for this post:

• http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,347212,00.html
• http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3689881.ece
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cern

• Know How Someone Is Thinking in 10 Seconds or Less Half-day training at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 13 June 08

• New Communications Forum 2008, 22-25 April 08 at The Vineyard Creek Inn & Spa, Sonoma County CA
• San Francisco Emetrics Marketing Optimzation Summit, 4-7 May 08
• International Communication Association's Communicating for Social Impact, the 58th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association at Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 22-26, 2008
• SUNY Marketing Professionals Conference at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 11-13 June 08

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