The new year has just barely arrived, but already red flags are being waved regarding Internet-based commerce. Gregory Wester, a director with market research firm The Yankee Group (Boston, Mass; http://www.yankeegroup.com), has predicted that the Web economy for ads, subscriptions and electronic commerce will hit a recession in 1997. On the other hand, though, the firm is also predicting that by the year 2000, Internet-based revenues will soar to $19 billion.
The key to continued growth, if The Yankee Group is to be believed, is desktop delivery, which will account for 30% of all Internet revenues within three years.
There are four distinct types of desktop delivery, or "push," technologies, according to Melissa Bane, a senior analyst at The Yankee Group: self-service, aggregated, mediated and direct. These classifications are based on issues such as who packages the on-line content, how much information can be distributed at once, and how much brand control a content provider may have.
As The Yankee Group sees it, most of today's push technologies are still immature, and ultimately the most important issue will not be which company dominates the market, but the overall utility of desktop delivery's four market segments. "The PointCast service and Marimba are different beasts," Wester explained. "They will likely co-exist, but technologies like Castanet from Marimba, Active Desktop from Microsoft and Constellation from Netscape may ultimately yield greater benefits to content developers."
Bane added, "We're advising our clients to aggressively pursue relationships with companies within each category. Today's most critical issue is not product rollout, but learning how to utilize all four desktop delivery approaches."