Today when I opened my mail, I had a mail from Infomedia Yellow pages, and the first thing that came to my mind was, " Did internet actually CHANGE anything?"
You can see that the stress here is on the word change, why is it, will be explained later in the post.
So let me tell everything from the beginning. First of all, what is Infomedia. Infomedia is an online yellow pages co. They have various listings for different services, for eg. you can find the nearest mall, cab services etc. Nothing unique, right, there are many such services viz. just dial, ask laila, sulekha.
Now let me explain what did I mean when I said CHANGE.
Well what would you say, are the 2 biggest changes happened due to internet. If you asked me an hour before writing the post, I would have said that
- It has reduced the information asymmetry, which was so dominant in our society that poor became poorer and rich became richer, and
- It removed the middlemen, the person who ate a big chunk of your profit and made things dearer for your customer.
But did it really happen, if you are saying yes, than think again. Which is the website you visit the most or which others visit the most. Is it your mail, your blog, your picture and video sharing website. I don't think so, according to me the most visited website on world wide web is Google.com. And it is a search engine. So how is Google being the search engine is related to the two problems.
Well, if you look again you will find that on one hand Google is helping people to reduce information asymmetry but on the other hand it itself is becoming rich and richer day by day because it has the highest amount of information, so who is becoming poor? Those who are paying Google and other such search engines for listing their product and services.
Also, in this whole process of people searching things and products on these search engines, don't these search engines work as a middlemen. They do and they still charge a heavy amount for it, the only thing that has been MODIFIED and not CHANGED is that earlier the middlemen use to earn without giving information but now they earn by giving it.
Hence we can see that nothing has CHANGED here, it is the same as it was in pre-internet era. But why talk about it, yes it has happened and we can't change it, we are so ADDICTED to search engines and yellow pages that whenever we need anything we simply go to a search engine.
Well it is simple, those who thought that the time of middlemen is over because of internet wake up, the middlemen is still here and he is more powerful than ever before. So why lose the opportunity, information is the new power and if you have it, being a middlemen can be the best profession one can ever have.
