Technical Chances of Internet Related Activities vs. the Crisis of the New Economy

摘要

The diffusion of Internet in the world, both in terms of "users" and "information suppliers" is continuously and constantly increasing. This market growth is based on a development that follows the usual behavior of technological innovation diffusion (S-shaped logistic curve), so it is allowed to obtain reliable forecasts about the future market trend. Nevertheless, despite the continuous growth of the "target", the e-business seems to be in a crucial situation absolutely unpredictable since few months ago, when viceversa looked as the main driving force of the "new economy" attacking the boundaries of the "global market". What appears as evident is the distrust of the financial markets with respect to internet-based activities. This distrust implies a poor reliability of these enterprises that could be due to many different sources, such as a feeble consistence or an extreme variability of performance obtained. The unreliability could be also due to the reduced amount of technical potentialities adopted and used to supply network services, while all the more powerful components linked to computer-based technologies - such as integrated distributed sources, quick answering time or interactivity - are present only in a negligible percentage of services. Frequent and skilled users of internet services are able to appreciate the advantages supplied by some "special" technical releases still available, such as a multi-source concurrent download instead of a simple "mirror choice" or an almost realtime answer due to an effective but simple page design that avoid weak data-transmissions. Moreover, many telecommunication suppliers are offering a high-speed connectivity based on different percentages for data transmission and reception, so vanishing definitely the concept of "total interactivity" among users and reinforcing the idea of a new broadcast-like medium. The objective of this paper is to investigate the potentialities of the growing market, through the actual and forecasted number of users, and the technical condition of the general offer, also in terms of typology and quality of the services supplied, trying to identify some future potentialities.