June 28, 1999
PC industry shows that you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear
Last week, I wrote that the PC industry suffers from the curse of inefficiency.
Some of you may have suspected I was just using strong language for rhetorical effect. If so, you obviously haven't been shopping for a computer recently.
The Internet only simplifies the PC buying process a little bit. If, as I wrote, RosettaNet or similar initiatives can help build a better back-end electronic-commerce infrastructure, more power to them.
But part of the problem is inherent in the way PC manufacturers do business, with their bewildering proliferation of models, features, and specifications.
If buying a car were like shopping for a PC, you'd have to remember that the Toyota 3871i is a compact pickup with a four-cylinder engine from 1997, while the 3875xl would be a larger truck with a V6 engine built in 1999.
The Ford Taurus 360 would be a compact sedan with air conditioning, AM/FM radio, but no passenger-side airbag, while the Taurus 380 would be the same model with dual airbags, but no radio or air conditioning.
All Toyotas would be black, all Hondas white, and all Chevys beige. Only Saturns would be available in a variety of colors, and because of that, Saturn's acting CEO would be accused of concentrating on marketing and packaging at the expense of technical innovation.
You might think that the Internet would change all this, making it easier for consumers to find the computers they want. It ain't necessarily so.
Testing the waters of e-commerce, I recently went shopping for a notebook computer. I visited sites such as CompareNet (www.compare.net) for specifications and suggested retail prices, Price Watch (www.pricewatch.com) for current street prices, and CNet's Computers.com (www.computers.com) for product specifications and links to resellers.
These sites were helpful research tools, although occasionally I found myself staring at large tables of data clearly intended to be read by machines, not humans.
Nevertheless, I was able to identify a few models that met my criteria. Had I stopped at that point and sat down to write this column, I would have had many positive things to say about how e-commerce enables comparison shopping.
But I didn't stop there -- I actually tried to purchase a computer listed in these databases. And that's where things started to get ugly.
CompareNet and Price Watch provided no way for me to directly purchase the items I had compared. Computers.com linked me to resellers' sites, but the product pages were nonexistent. Instead, I got error messages such as "Search found 0 entries which contained RCP6195," and "Error retrieving Product page information."
I had better luck getting to an order form by going directly to e-retailers such as Buy.com (www.buy.com) and Insight (www.insight.com). But I found a smaller selection of products -- and significantly higher prices.
Frankly, after all that running around, I was feeling discouraged about the current state of e-commerce.
One thing is clear, in the PC industry or any other: No amount of Web flash and dazzle will help a company that isn't prepared for the way consumers shop online. Dynamically served product pages are worthless if your product lines are too complex to compare, let alone describe, online.
Is there any hope for the PC industry online? Write to me at dylan@infoworld.com.
Dylan Tweney is the content development manager for InfoWorld Electric. He has been writing about the Internet since 1993.
Previous columns by Dylan Tweney
RosettaNet decodes the long-lost secrets of internetworking
June 21, 1999
Clueless banks are spelling opportunity for online start-ups
June 14, 1999
Better claim your space: The Internet land grab will produce many minimonopolies
June 7, 1999
Affiliate marketing: the future of e-commerce or another hard sell?
May 31, 1999
Every column since August, 1997
