It’s time to make money in the Web!

Increasingly, companies are turning to the Internet to set up customer support bulletin boards offering technical advice, monitoring customer satisfaction, providing new product information, and making software upgrades available electronically.
For many companies, it’s a cost-effective way to do business. By supporting customers electronically, they save the expense of 800 numbers and corporate news¬letters announcing upgrades. Customers, meanwhile, save on long-distance phone calls. What’s more, simple upgrades can be quickly distributed to your customer base at no expense—a technique used extensively by Apple with its Macintosh software suite.
On the Internet, small businesses can tap into a global community of more than 20,000,000 users to swap mail, make contacts, market products, search databases and other reference sources, and even engage in real-time discussions for less than $20 a month. Larger companies can buy their own direct Internet hookups starting at about $160, and high-speed, leased-line connections to the network— connections capable of supporting hundreds of employees using the Internet simultaneously—can be maintained for under $1,500 per month.
Although there are unquestionably many advantages of doing business on the Internet, there are also many risks and problems. In addition to the business-averse Internet culture, there are also security breaches, traffic jams, and reliability problems that crop up from time to time.
Another problem is that much of the underlying Internet technology is based on the somewhat arcane UNIX operating system; low-cost, dialup connections are likely to plop you right in the middle of a UNIX session, leaving novice users hopelessly lost.
Right now, security is probably the most pressing concern that most businesses have about connecting to the Internet. Late in 1993, for instance, electronic “crackers” broke into the Internet and began stealing account passwords for a variety of different machines. By the time anybody noticed, the bandits had already learned thousands of passwords, the keys to public and private computer accounts throughout the world. No one knows exactly how many passwords were stolen, but according to The New York Times, officials at the government-funded Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) estimate that tens of thousands of computers around the world have been put at risk—computers not just on the Inter¬net but on any computer network attached to it.
Then there are the traffic jams. On the Internet, as on any real-world roadway, traffic tie-ups occur when thousands of people try to tap into a particular computer at once. One example is the Illinois National Center for Supercomputer Applications computer, which offers free copies of the popular Internet browsing software, Mosaic. So many users try to download the software from the machine that it often slows to a veritable crawl trying to meet the demand. Other times, due to its traffic load, it simply refuses entry to users trying to connect. Internet computers and data providers are working to add capacity, although it seems a safe bet that however fast networks are expanded, there will always be places where user demand will exceed computer capacity. Call it rush hour on the information highway!
Another occasional problem is network reliability. Unlike centralized for-profit services like CompuServe and Prodigy, there’s no guarantee that your message or data will get to where you send it in a timely manner, and there are precious few reliable ways of checking or confirming receipt. Our experience shows that the system is nonetheless quite reliable, with hundreds of messages transmitted without incident to Eastern Europe, India and the People’s Republic of China for every message that vanishes or bounces back.