Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 24, 1994 TAG: 9404220162
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JIM SHEELER KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: BOULDER, COLO. LENGTH: Long
Thousands of miles away, on a snowy day in Boulder, Dan Angst, regional sales manager at Compatible Systems Corp., happens to be browsing around the Internet and sees the cry for help on his computer screen.
``We can easily help this guy out,'' Angst says, clacking away at the keyboard. It turns out the New Yorker needed assistance with a product manufactured by the Boulder-based computer networking company.
With a click of his mouse, Angst sends the message off to Compatible Systems' technical support department. Within hours, technicians will respond to the question, type up a detailed answer and send it back to the man in New York.
``Right now, that guy doesn't even know he's getting technical support,'' said Tom Ferrell, Compatible Systems' technical marketing manager. ``How much better can customer service be? He's being helped, and he doesn't even know it.''
The cost of Compatible Systems' cross-country response: relatively little - technical support is provided free of charge. The probable return: a new respect and gratitude from the customer.
The method: the Internet.
Most everyone's heard of the worldwide computer network known as the Internet (``the Net'' for short), but many businesses are only beginning to explore its possibilities.
By hooking a computer up to a modem - an electronic device that transmits computer signals over phone lines - businesses and individuals are going ``on-line'' in record numbers. Estimates of users on the Internet range from 15 million to 20 million worldwide.
The Internet was set up about 20 years ago by the Defense Department as a way to prevent communication between the nation's top secret computers from being wiped out by enemy bombs. The government created an information web built around thousands of computers, so that if one of the machines got knocked out, the precious data could be rerouted.
Universities and research institutions were the first ones outside the government allowed on-line. For years, scientists and academics surfed the computer lines, dipping into world-class libraries for information.
But the end of the Cold War opened up more than just the Eastern Bloc. The wall that kept business away from the Internet is also beginning to fall, and companies are furiously hammering away, looking for commercial opportunities on the Net.
According to the Internet Society, 50 percent of the Fortune 500 is on the Internet, and two-thirds of the Internet's 15 million users work for major corporations. Of the Internet's 150,000 new subscribers each month, a substantial number are business connections.
What are the companies doing in cyberspace? For some businesses, the Internet offers almost instant worldwide access to customers, salespeople and important information. Other businesses and individuals may do well to avoid the hype and temporarily wait out the Internet's growing pains.
In its most basic form, the Internet is nothing more than the world's greatest long-distance calling plan.
By offering international access for the price of a local phone call, the Internet beats the heck out of anything AT&T or MCI can offer - without the annoying commercials from Candice Bergen or O.J. Simpson's mom.
Through electronic mail, the Internet's most widely used function, a company such as Compatible Systems - which makes hardware and software allowing computers to talk to each other - can provide technical support to customers all over the world. E-mail is also being used in company-to-company communication to cut through corporate red tape.
When using E-mail, you never get tossed into phone jail, doomed to the hellish fate of listening to a computerized operator's voice asking you to ``press 1 to listen to the next 15 options.'' E-mail, unlike a fax, won't end up curled at the bottom of the fax machine or lost at the bottom of a colleague's ``in'' basket.
The whole process takes only a few seconds and probably has a better chance of getting read than the latest office memo. The E-mail phenomenon is so popular that it is being offered, to a degree, on local bulletin board systems and by most major on-line services, such as America Online and CompuServe, which periodically dump their members' E-mail postings onto the Internet.
``With a lot of customers I'm trying to contact for some reason, I can leave 50 phone messages, and none of them get returned. I leave one E-mail, and I get a response,'' Compatible's Ferrell said.
E-mail is nothing new to computer behemoths such as IBM and Storage Technology Inc. These companies established their own internal E-mail systems long ago.
What makes the Internet special is that any small company can go outside internal E-mail and, without having to set up an expensive system, have access to the world.
While an E-mail address usually costs only a few dollars a month, once businesses decide to start accessing the meat of the Internet, cost-benefit analyses come into play.
By gaining full access to the Net, companies can chat with experts who may help them solve problems that would otherwise take months to solve. They can download, or receive by modem, enormous batches of research text from libraries around the world. They can track trends in different industries and test the waters for potential new products.
The Internet's USENET function lists thousands of ``newsgroups'' where users post E-mail on topics ranging from ``alt.space news'' for aerospace enthusiasts to ``alt.barney.dinosaur.die'' for users wishing to take out their frustrations on the ubiquitous purple menace.
Hundreds of thousands of free software programs are downloaded from the system daily via the Net's file transfer protocol, or ftp. From this service, you can transfer many free software files. Some of the programs can, for example, help with business tax questions or provide the latest software upgrade - others will make ``Sesame Street's'' Oscar the Grouch pop out of your Macintosh's trash can singing ``I love trash.''
``A lot of it is sex appeal,'' said Boulder Internet consultant Art Smoot. ``You go click, click, click, and you're in [an information database] in Slovenia, and you think, `There's got to be something good in there!'''
While demographics are impossible to come by on a system with more than a quarter-million new users every two months, it's safe to say that right now the Internet is populated mostly by highly educated, 20- to 40-year-old men. But with the increasing numbers of individuals - especially the hordes of college students - logging on, those demographics are likely to shift.
``I would only go on-line at this point if it's cost effective. We're still dealing with a very limited audience, and if that's not where you want to be, don't spend the money,'' said Suzanne Lainson, who moderates the Online Marketing conference on Boulder's OneNet bulletin board and frequently accesses Internet for a book she's writing.
``The challenge right now is to sort out the hype from the reality,'' Lainson said. ``Right now, it makes sense for a few businesses and eventually it will make sense for any business. Before you do anything, you should see what's there, and then you can decide if you're going to hit your target audience.''
Before businesses hook up to a full Internet connection, some consultants suggest they figure out exactly how the Net would affect the bottom line. Partial links to the Internet are available, and some companies would rather only have access to the USENET Newsgroups that are directly related to the business, such as groups in ``entrepreneur.misc,'' without having to worry about whether the employees are using business time to sneak around in ``alt.sex.''
by CNB