Charlene Blake, a school teacher from Springfield, Virginia, has used cyberspace to strike a blow for the consumer. She bought a 1992 Chrysler Dodge Caravan with ABS brakes which, when it was about a year old, started to go wrong. There was some to-ing and fro-ing and then, just after the warranty ran out, Charlene was told it would cost $2,100 to repair. She obviously went to the same garage as I do. But Charlene was outraged, and decided to investigate further. Initially, whenever she saw any vehicles of the same make parked, she put leaflets under the windscreen wipers asking the owner to get in touch if they had had a similar problem. Almost immediately one guy contacted her and this helped confirm her suspicions. Charlene then discovered that there was a newsgroup devoted to Chrysler (rec.auto.makers.chrysler) so she posted a cyber equivalent of her windscreen leaflet. Within days she had found 60 people across the US with the same problem and one of the people had a friend who was an attorney who specialised in such cases. He eventually collected another 40 aggrieved Chrysler owners and mounted a class action. He discovered that Chrysler had known about this defect for some time but had done nothing about it and, aside from ignoring the potential danger, had allowed owners to continue to go to garages and pay for the repairs. Chrysler ended up recalling over 300,000 vehicles and reimbursing owners who had paid for the repairs. They also bought back Charlene's car outright but made her sign an agreement which forbids her from disclosing any of the other details. Anyway, there we have it: if there isn't one already, I am going to set up a newsgroup to see whether any other Ford owners have got cars whose electrics seem to disintegrate the moment the guarantee runs out. Then there is that cork screw that never worked...
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A new word is about to enter the lexicon: cyberskiving. Employers are discovering that staff who have internet links are spending more time than they ought to dawdling in cyberspace on company time. This is not unlike the 0898 phenomenon, which led to the widespread introduction of call censoring on company switchboards. On the internet some of the protective software which can be used to bar pornography can also be used to limit the amount of time that people can surf or the places they can go to. Let's hope they set it up more successfully than some of our schools have done. These days in the more turned on playgrounds there is a trade in passwords which allow pupils to circumvent the obstacles designed to limit their internet access. "Psst! A bag of marbles and ten Premier league stickers gets you to the Spice Girls site, gimme fifteen and I'll throw in a couple of Ace Ventura films."
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KPMG asked Harris Research to find out what big companies in Britain thought about the new ways of doing business electronically (Electronic Commerce Research Report). Two thirds of the 100 firms in the survey, all with turnovers above ?200m per annum, were already using the new technologies. Altogether electronic commerce contributes only 3 per cent of sales, but by the end of 1997 this is expected to rise to 5 per cent, and by the year 2000 it might reach 20 per cent. Serious stuff. However there is still a low level of understanding at board level of what needs to be done and this may partly explain why so many firms have such small budgets for internet-related developments. Of the 100 firms surveyed 31 were spending ?10,000 per annum or under, with the average standing at ?37,000, but expected to rise to ?120,000 by the year 2000. Marketing is likely to remain the single most common business use of the internet with, "competitor research" coming in second place. There is a moral there somewhere.
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Inexplicably the KPMG survey did not find its way on to the web site of NUA Internet Marketing (www.nua.ie). I say this because they seem to have brought together just about every other internet survey. It was reassuring to learn, for example, that in Slovenia the "socio-demographic structure of internet users is similar as in the rest of the world" (sic) and unsurprising to discover that, of the five largest countries in Europe, France had the lowest level of home use of the internet (fewer than 100,000 households). It is now estimated that Europe accounts for about 20 per cent of the world internet user population (about 10m) with Germany leading the field and the UK not far behind. Predictably, in Asia and the Pacific region internet use is starting on a rapid upward curve, but wake up New Zealand, you seem to be getting left behind. Surely Bryan Gould should be doing something about this. n
John Carr
