Infinite demand loops

Given that so much of publishing — here, as elsewhere — takes place on the Internet, many at InfoWorld have read with great interest Test Center Contributing Editor Mike Heck’s comparison of four leading Web analytics solutions (see “Chart your Web site’s success”).

The article reminds me of what it was like in the early days of Web commercialization, when we had to rely on day-old server logs for information, and people still counted “hits.”

I can remember meeting with our programmers sometime around 1996 to explore ways of measuring traffic flow between sections of a site — what would today be called clickstream analysis. We all concluded that such a tool would be wonderful, but no one had time to build it!

Since then this tool has been built many times over, as Heck’s article notes, and succeeded by many more clever ways to optimize traffic, performance, and revenue. And yet I can tell you that as users of one of the reviewed packages (we look at products from Coremetrics, NetIQ, Omniture, and WebSideStory), we at InfoWorld now yearn for other features the Web analytics vendors have yet to create.

So it goes with technology. Each advance opens new territory and solves an existing need. Yet as people begin to explore that territory, inevitably they also come to believe that even richer land lies just over the horizon — a principle that weaves through several articles in this issue.

Test Center Lead Analyst Jon Udell, for example, describes an explorer-like epiphany in discovering Google’s new Maps feature (see Strategic Developer). But however much you may be impressed by Google’s wizardry with DHTML, JavaScript, and XSLT (XSL Transformation), I guarantee that in six months we’ll want even more.

The principle crops up again in Leon Erlanger’s guide to smart IT purchasing (see “Seven strategies for highly effective buyers”). Strategy No. 1 is to anticipate your future needs so you can negotiate now for capabilities you may not need for several years. That’s not easy, obviously. But for things such as storage and bandwidth, where usage rises as hardware improves, you can assume your needs will continue to accelerate just as they have in the past. One key example: the demand that VoIP may put on your wireless LAN, as Galen Gruman cautions in his article “VoWIP untethers the office phone.”

The basic idea is that the demand for machine intelligence is essentially limitless. However fast capacity may grow, demand — like traffic on the Long Island Expressway or leftovers in the office refrigerator — will grow as fast or faster. And that is why IT’s job will never end.