More Than A Vision

Electronic commerce in retailing has reached the point where results are being achieved

While the team at Retail Futures believes that the time is now ripe for electronic retailing, can there be such confidence given the failure of other, no less 'timely' concepts such as Cable TV and Videotext to be taken up?

John Andrews of Retail Futures is confident that it will be different for eCommerce. "The Superhighway will not go away. There is massive commitment both financially and intellectually to ensure that demand for Internet services will grow unabated."

There has been a progressive shake-out of the contenders for market share, with one vendor's platform accepted increasingly as the core of eCommerce solutions. The vendor singled out was inevitably Microsoft; partly because of the range of hardware on which the Microsoft Windows NT environment is supported. Having been implemented on clustered Compaq and quasi-mainframe hardware like the large Tandem machines, the Windows