How to Really Make a Revolution
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/81/szuboff.html

Why the Internet didn't fuel a true revolution.

*From:* Issue 81 <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/81> *|* April
2004, Page 100 *By:* Shoshana Zuboff
<http://www.fastcompany.com/finder/fc?w=%22Shoshana%20Zuboff%22>
*Photographs by: *John Abbott *Illustrations by: *Michael Meister

"The Internet was supposed to knock off established businesses," Bill
Gates opined recently. But the real impact of the Internet revolution,
he said, "is so much less than a lot of people think." Hey, Bill, we're
there.


Yes, the Internet is a force of nature, a hurricane of information at
our fingertips. We message, chat, and search. We book travel, monitor
bank accounts, research insurance policies, compare products, and
one-click our way from books to buffalo steak. But those who rely on the
Net to escape the worst trials of daily consumption know only too well
that the revolution didn't happen. Internet users now appear to spend
nearly 10 hours a week online--most of it taking care of stuff for
themselves and their families. For today's time-starved women and men,
this is hardly a solution. Instead of giving us back our time, the Net
takes more of it.

What's worse, with all that information, the Net hasn't improved
consumption in the ways we need most. In a study that compared patients'
ratings of health care in five English-speaking countries, the United
States ranked last or second-to-last in patient safety,
patient-centeredness, efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. Patients
say doctors don't listen, aren't accessible, and don't give enough time.
The Internet has filled the information gap, with 80% of Internet users
doing health searches, but it has done little to transform the delivery
of health care.

What will change things? Gates says the answer lies in more powerful
software that provides rich information across every boundary and
device. We need those breakthroughs, but is that enough to ignite the
economic revolution once promised by the Internet? I don't think so.

This kind of wishful thinking has great credentials. For decades,
historians were mesmerized by the "industry" in industrial revolutions.
Power looms and steam engines got much of the credit for the first
industrial revolution in 18th-century Britain; the assembly line was the
symbol of mass production in the early-20th-century United States. We
know now that in those economic revolutions, technology wasn't the star,
but one member of an ensemble cast. New consumers played a key role,
too. In the 18th century, rising incomes created new demand. In
early-20th-century America, new urban masses needed to buy goods once
produced in their homes and villages.

If there was a star in those earlier dramas, it was something far more
audacious than a new machine. It was an idea of Copernican stature,
powerful enough to reorder the known universe of producing and
consuming. I call it a "new enterprise logic." Eighteenth-century
entrepreneurs like Josiah Wedgwood pioneered consumer marketing and
invented much of what came to be understood as "factory work." They
reconceived the commercial process, consolidating many fragmented
activities under the control of a single owner. This laid the foundation
for more than a century of "proprietary capitalism" and explosive growth.

More than 100 years later, Henry Ford played a similar role when he
discovered the then-unknown economics of mass production. Instead of
custom-making each expensive car to the specifications of a wealthy
buyer, he made one kind of car at an ever lower price, relying on
volume, not margins, for profit. Ford's unprecedented idea became the
cornerstone of the second industrial revolution and the century of
managerial capitalism that followed.

So here's the news flash: Revolution can't be automated. It is brewed in
a perfect storm of new markets, new technologies, and a new enterprise
logic. That third force--the Copernican idea--was missing from the
Internet revolution. We had people hungry for a new consumption
experience, and a technology capable of delivering it. But instead of a
new enterprise logic, the old adversarial business model prevailed.
Internet companies scrambled for survival at their customers' expense,
selling private information, chasing us with ads, conning us with low
prices and high fees, and secretly monitoring our behavior. They settled
for a new distribution channel when they could have made a real revolution.

Wishful thinking is being thought again. Carnegie-Mellon recently hosted
the kickoff of the "100 by 100" consortium, whose goal is 100 million
homes with Internet speeds of 100 megabytes a second. Another group at
MIT is developing "next-generation Internet architecture." These efforts
are vital, but there's something missing: the new enterprise logic that
can finally harness the Internet to a fundamentally new conception of
commerce. Without that, the only revolution we'll see is the one
produced by a revolving door.

Shoshana Zuboff <http://www.fastcompany.com/about/team/szuboff.html> is
a professor at Harvard Business School and the coauthor of /The Support
Economy/ (Viking, 2002).