Page 260 - The Drucker Lectures

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The Future of the Corporation III

2003

s all of you probably know, it is very old wisdom that who-
Aever has the information has the power. With the Internet,
the customer has all the information. In fact, if you were to write
an economic or social history of the last 200 years, one very co-
gent thread would be the shift of information from the very few
at the top, where the makers had all the information about a
product or service. Within the lifetime of a good many of us in
this room, the information shifted to the distributors. And now
it is shifting to the customer.
But is the Internet just another distribution channel? Or is
the Internet an altogether different market? Now, I can only
hope that this is the right question. But I don’t think I can get
an answer. And if anybody comes to me, as a few old clients have
done, to say, “Help us decide this for our business,” I don’t even
know where to begin.
You know, those of us in this room take marketing for granted.
But until fairly recently, marketing was not a term anybody used.
When you look at the history, beginning with the Industrial
Revolution in 1765 or so, the steam engine was applied to factory
production of existing products like textiles. The demand could
not be satisfied simply because there was not enough produc-
tive capacity. There was no marketing, and there was no selling.
There was only supplying.

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