10.2 The Internet, computer networks and e-commerce
Personal and professional effectiveness flows, in large part, from the effectiveness of the ways we able to describe and understand the world. To develop a highly practical, detailed and clear understanding of e-commerce it is useful to start from a very simple and robust set of descriptions.
Computers process data – information and processing instructions encoded into the native language of computers called ‘binary’, which consists of zeros and ones. They take data as ‘input’ and process that to create data ‘output’:
- input data can be sourced from devices such as keyboards, mice, computer memory, hard disks, scanners, modems and digital cameras.
- output data can be sent to devices such as the computer screens, memory, hard disks, sound cards and speakers, printers, modems and USB or memory keys.
Some devices, such as computer memory, hard disks, memory keys and CD/DVD rewriters can allow both input and output data. A stand-alone computer can only process data from and to the devices that are connected to that one computer (Figure 1.2).
Figure 10. 2 Computers and data processing
In contrast, a computer connected to other computers via a network or the Internet can:
- Access software operating on a remote computer –
for example, registering to sell a favourite old guitar on auction site eBay, accessing an online procurement system for buying spare truck parts or placing a book order on Amazon.com. This can also involve accessing the processing power of a remote computer – for example using an Internet search engine like Google to find information on ‘road transport services in Germany’.
Note this:
eBay is an e-commerce auction site that allows people to advertise, buy and sell items like ‘collectibles, antiques, sports memorabilia, computers, toys, beanie babies, dolls, figures, coins, stamps, books, magazines, music, pottery, glass, photography, electronics, jewellery, gemstones, and much more’. On the Internet: www.ebay.com.au or www.ebay.com
- Exchange data with a remote computer –
for example, looking up weather forecasts on a government meteorology website, seeing live images of Paris through a webcam (for example, see webcams at http://www.abcparislive.com/), listening to Latin music stored on a computer in Puerto Rico, producing a web catalogue of products and services for customers to access, or sending an e-mail to a colleague. - Exchange data with devices connected to a remote computer.
for example,sending instructions to a computer that controls a NASA satellite, printing a document on your office’s network printer, or sending SMS messages via the Internet.
In another way of looking at things, a set of networked computers could be regarded as doing everything a stand-alone computer does: it has users, and data is created, processed, stored and presented. The difference is that, unlike a stand-alone computer, the users and the places that data is created, processed, stored and presented can be at different physical locations – across a room or across the world. From this viewpoint, the technical aspects of designing an e-commerce system involves thinking about the system’s intended users and outcomes, and as a consequence, where data was created, stored, processed and applied (Figure 1.3).
Figure 10. 3 Computer networks
That’s it. Although there can be some variations regarding the type of computer devices involved (for example, traditional computers, mobile phones, handheld wireless devices, etc), on a raw functional level there is nothing more that the Internet actually does. Any e-commerce activity we can point to or imagine will be an instance or combination of these simple types of activity.
So before we even need to think much about Internet jargon, terms, specifications or trends, we can say that – on a technical and functional level – the emergence, growth, and future of e-commerce is concerned with how these computer and networking capabilities are applied to meet human, business and organisational purposes.
If it is that simple, why do we see and hear things telling us e-commerce is so profound and important? The reason is that, as indicated by the examples above, these simple types of computer-based activity allow people to do a lot of new, different and useful things. In effect the most challenging aspect of e-commerce is at the human level: in understanding how these computer network-based activities can be designed to help achieve our personal, business and organisational outcomes.
How can you gain value from this way to understand the nature of the Internet and e-commerce? Well, both the Internet and e-commerce are responsible for what has to be the largest explosion in new and mysterious jargon in the history of mankind. However the core technology and concepts are quite simple. In later chapters we will use this set of ideas to relate different business models, analyse different types of e-commerce activity, and evaluate e-commerce options.
Back Page