Back in the summer of the post-dot-com-bubble-pop (a.k.a. 2001), fellow tech. writer--let's call her "A"--and I drove from Rochester, MN to the Minneapolis Convention Center for a tech. expo. She was looking for work--and tchotchkes. Whereas I'd talked my first line supervisor into letting me put 8 hours into this junket on the pretext of research, specifically the question, "What does the internet mean to your business?"
Let's face it, that particular tech. expo. was already showing the effects of the post-bubble hangover. The convention center had had to fill the space by booking a manufacturing-related expo. at the same time, discreetly partitioning them with blue curtains. As it turns out, the best answer to that question came from the manufacturing side. A micro-manufacturer of industrial tools related the story of how a customer in desperate need of a replacement for broken equipment had emailed the CAD drawings to them. After taking a look a the drawings, the manufacturer called the customer--a few hours' drive away--and said, "Send your truck now. We'll have it ready for you by the time you get here."
Naturally, at the time I was all drop-jawed about the competitive advantage that "internet time" provided. (Dennis, being a manufacturing engineer at the time, was trained in a world where dead-tree prints would have to be shipped, then re-drawn by one of the manufacturer's techs, and only then could the actual business of "manufacturing" begin. Even at dail-up speeds, receiving a digital file that could be directly imported made for blazing turnaround times.) Even today, I caught myself annoyed with Canon for only just drop-shipping yesterday a part that I ordered (gasp!) all the way back on Saturday. (The horror...)
Now, in many, many parts of the world, such digitization and delivery capabilities are positively banal. And, to me, that's a good thing. I was reminded of that tonight when I pulled a non-bill, non mass-mail envelope out of the stack. A small business' company envelope, obviously, with the city/state/zip line nearly running off the Avery label. The one-page form-letter offered the services of a (relatively) local moving storage company. Short, sweet, who-we-are-and-what-we-can-offer-you. (No physical signature above the printed one, which would scandalize Mom--old-school enough to hold each sheet of bond paper to the light to verify that the watermark was correctly aligned. But it was obviously proofread for grammar and spelling, which (sadly) pretty much puts it ahead in the game.)
The backstory is that Dennis & I just put our home up for sale, so it's pretty obvious that the MLS listing prompted the contact. And good on them for showing some hustle. In the end, it doesn't matter that property listings no longer have to wait for the classified. Nor even that reverse lookups (of addresses or phone numbers to people) are stupid-simple (if you don't mind popup ads and enough cookies to choke a certain fuzzy blue Sesame Street character). But it's the first moving-related offer I've seen since a bare-bones listing went live nearly two weeks ago.
And I can't help but notice that, in both cases, neither firm could be described as a "technology" company. Speaking for myself, I think we programmer/technology types sometimes take technology for its own sake a little too seriously. For the manufacturing and moving company, it's not All About how quickly they can access information; it's about how capable they are of doing something constructive with it. Dunno about anybody else, but I can't help but be a little humbled by that.
