Internet actually happened!!!

The promise of a billion people instantly connected to
the Internet sounded like a pipe dream in the mid-90’s,
but guess what? It actually happened.
Today over a billion people are connected to the
Internet and using it like crazy. Heck, since the Internet
took off I can’t even remember the last time I visited
my local bank or walked into a Blockbuster to rent a
movie. I don’t even know if real live travel agents still
exist anymore thanks to Expedia.com.
The Internet “actually happening” has meant that the
benefits to having a truly networked audience can make
lots of businesses highly scaleable and far more cost
effective. Here are just a few of the key reasons why
the proliferation of the Internet means so much:

The viral Internet got real. In the last five years
we’ve seen the true power of viral marketing on the
Internet. Companies like Napster, PayPal and MySpace
have grown to tens of millions of users within just a
few years simply by referral. That same rate of user
acquisition a decade ago would have cost tens of
millions of dollars and would have taken ten years.
A billion people actually use it. Think about this for a
second. Even five years ago you had people
experimenting with stuff like eBay. Today thousands
of people actually make their living on eBay. When the
Internet goes from a “nifty tool” to a “basic necessity”
the power of that Network increases exponentially.
It scales like a mother. Once startups understood that
the fastest way to grow a business is to have a truly
scaleable on-line product, companies like PayPal and
Google went through the roof. Sure, you can open up
20 restaurants a year, but nothing grows faster than an
Internet-based company simply adding more servers to
support more customers.
It’s really easy to get started. Any idiot with
computer and the most basic knowledge of the Web can
(and has) open up shop on-line. This means that the
barrier to entry for new startups has plummeted
significantly (I’m still not sure if this is good or bad
judging from some of the incredibly lame Web sites
I’ve seen, but hey – who am I to judge?)
Obviously the Internet isn’t new, but it’s important to
understand just how much it has evolved in the last five
years as a key business startup tool. That is not to say
that companies who do not have an Internet strategy are
doomed, but it’s hard to ignore an instantly addressable
market of 1 billion people as a key game-changing
trend.