Intel’s Maloney To Internet World 2000: "Get Real"

LIVE FROM INTERNET WORLD - For Sean Maloney, senior vice president and director of worldwide sales and marketing for Intel Corp., the commercial exploitation of the Internet in recent years resembled the game show, "Who Wants To Be A Billionaire?" It's a game where the results hasn't been as real as anticipated.

Maloney gave opinions about where the Internet has been and where it is going in the morning keynote address at Spring Internet World 2000, an Internet trade show expected to attract more than 50,000 visitors to the Los Angeles Convention Center before it closes on Friday.

Even though everyone knows of barely post-pubescent kids becoming Internet millionaires virtually overnight, not every first mover has been successful on the Internet, Maloney said. However, he said, every successful Internet company until now has been a first mover. For Maloney, a "first mover" is a company that takes the risk in developing an untried business model, spends the required initial investment, and takes the business online.

Before 1994, Maloney said, corporate life was dominated by the quest for profits; the bottom-line was all-important.

However, within the last two years, e-commerce companies have been taking their focus from present profitability to a "land grab" approach, the grabbing of consumers to a Web site.

But today, according to Maloney, the Internet is entering a "New Real Economy;" an economy that is seeing a rapid return to focusing on the costs of operations as well as costs of investment. It is also an economy in which there is very little forgiveness and no slack. No slack in margins, no slack in inventory, and no slack in time.

The reason for that is the Internet has provided consumers, as well as competitors, with better knowledge of products and prices, he said. This, in turn, has required online businesses to trim all possible slack from their operations in order to preserve profit margins.

According to Maloney, speed and beating customer expectations are essential to success on the Net. Just meeting expectations is no longer good enough for an e-business.

Maloney sees the Internet-economy becoming one of new efficiency metrics, and he mentioned a few recent developments that he feels are helping to build an Internet infrastructure that is cost efficient.

"Speed is of the essence" in the new Internet economy, Maloney says, but "the promise of bandwidth is always one year away." So, even though North America is ahead of the rest of the world in high-speed capability, there is a trend to move data, particularly vast amounts of data, towards the edge of the Internet.

Maloney explains that by moving data to the edge of the Internet, a consumer in Asia who wishes to download information from a Web site with a server in San Francisco, will not receive that data after it has gone through 18 different switches on its one-way journey. Instead, "server farms" consisting of large numbers of optic servers on the same network as the client that will contain the bulk of the data in many Web sites, thereby cutting the time, and freeing up the bandwidth, for the delivery of that information.

The next generation of the Internet will integrate the Web into everyone’s lives; not just at work, but at home. And, this integration will be accomplished wirelessly.

To establish this point, Maloney then demonstrated a series of products using Intel processors that will reach the market in the third and fourth quarters of 2000.

Part of Maloney’s presentation was one of the first public demonstrations of Bluetooth technology, which allows digital devices in close proximity to each other to communicate, wirelessly.

Maloney said that the Internet would lose its cable and wires as technology and consumers’ expectations drive the "cutting of the cord."

At home, there will be Internet access in every room, with various devices being connected through just one PC, regardless of where in the house they are located or moved, he said.

Computers of the future will also be smaller, as more and more applications will reside on the Net, thereby reducing the need for desktop storage of applications, as well as the size of desktop PCs.

Several of these smaller, more stylish PCs were "modeled" during Maloney’s presentation and not only were they smaller, they came in a colorful boxes that appeared to have been designed by an architectural-artist, and not, to use Maloney’s word, a "geek."

Maloney’s final message, like the Internet-enabled life he envisioned, was simple. "Get ready to get real," he said.

Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com.