> >supermarket shelves could empty, ATM cards may stop
> >working and even manufacturing could come to a standstill as a result
Gad - it could be as bad as the Y2K bug!
> Supermarket inventory systems are not Internet-based.
Most of the orders from the major supermarkets to their suppliers are sent
electronically. Orders to small suppliers are mostly sent by automated
faxes. Orders to large suppliers are mostly sent via EDI, and a surprising
amount of that still uses private networks (e.g. GEIS) rather than the
internet - this is mostly for legacy reasons - it is taking a long time for
some major companies to move all of their inter-company transaction
processing to use the internet as carrier.
However, even if all the orders generated by the Supermarket inventory
systems were sent to suppliers via the net, and we had "Internet Meltdown",
it wouldn't result in everyone starving to death. The supermarkets &
suppliers would revert to what they used to do - phone orders - and while
that would mean some people on the phone a lot, its not an insurmountable
problem.
When I was the e-commerce manager at Coca-Cola Amatil in the 1990s we
implemented receiving EDI orders from our major customers, and I tried
(mostly unsuccessfully) to counter the hype of the companies selling the
software, and consultants from the Fat Five (KPWaterhouseAndersenDeloit),
who all promised our senior management "you'll save millions if you do this
e-commerce stuff".
The actual cost benefit figures looked like this:
People resources required to receive orders via phone from our 5 largest
customers (i.e. Woolworths, Coles, Franklins, Davids, McD's who were
responsible for approx 50% - $1,000,000,000 p.a. - of CCA's total sales in
Australia) = one full time employee - say total $100,000 cost to receive
those orders via the phone.
So by receiving the orders via EDI we directly saved $100,000. On the
downside, that employee who used to spend his time talking to all our major
customer's warehouses picked up all sorts of useful information on the
phone - e.g. "this warehouse might have industrial trouble tomorrow, so gee
we better get the deliveries in today", etc. That information he picked up
was probably worth, oh, say $100,000 benefit to us over the course of a
year.
I'll not deny there are benefits from moving from paper to electronic, and
from electronic with people to electronic without people. But the benefits
have been oversold. The obverse of that is that the costs of the old
processes aren't insurmountable, and they could easily be used again if
there was "Internet Meltdown" for a period.
Regards, Mark
Mark Hughes
Effective Business Applications Pty Ltd
effectivebusiness@pplications.com.au
www.pplications.com.au
+61 4 1374 3959
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-link@www.anu.edu.au [mailto:owner-link@www.anu.edu.au]On
> Behalf Of Chirgwin, Richard
> Sent: Friday, 1 March 2002 08:24
> To: link@www.anu.edu.au
> Subject: RE: [LINK] ABC Catalyst Tonight: 'Internet Meltdown'
>
>
> The ignorance in the blurb is also exhibited - no, trumpeted! - in this
> line:
> >supermarket shelves could empty, ATM cards may stop
> >working and even manufacturing could come to a standstill as a result
>
> Supermarket inventory systems are not Internet-based. ATM
> machines still use
> leased line connections, for the very good reason that banks
> don't trust the
> Internet for ATM transactions. And manufacturing as an Internet-dependent
> activity?
>
> Richard Chirgwin
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Roger Clarke [mailto:Roger.Clarke@xamax.com.au]
> > Sent: Thursday, 28 February 2002 16:07
> > To: link@www.anu.edu.au
> > Subject: [LINK] ABC Catalyst Tonight: 'Internet Meltdown'
> >
> >
> >
> > http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/promo.htm
> > says there's a segment tonight on:
> >
> > "Internet Meltdown
> >
> > "Graham Phillips reports on a new weapon in the computer hacker's
> > arsenal - so powerful it could bring down the entire Internet.
> > They're called Worms and both computers hackers and IT experts agree
> > Worms are so virulent they could can infect the entire internet
> > within 20 minutes of release, leaving no time for antivirus companies
> > or people to react. The result of Internet meltdown would be
> > disastrous - supermarket shelves could empty, ATM cards may stop
> > working and even manufacturing could come to a standstill as a result"
> >
> >
> > The comments I sent to Catalyst were:
> >
> > That blurb is so bad that I think it harms Catalyst's credibility.
> >
> > The concept of the worm was invented in John Brunner's 'The Shockwave
> > Rider', published in 1975. The first real one was in 1988-89. It's
> > simply a virus that's propagated over a network rather than through
> > discrete media like floppy disks or CD-ROMs.
> >
> > The vast majority of worms take advantage of criminally negligent
> > deficiencies in the default settings of Microsoft products, plus
> > large numbers of bugs in the same products, and directly affect only
> > those people who are silly enough to use them. That's such a large
> > population that, yes, explosions of traffic have occurred on several
> > occasions, and it's conceivable that worse can happen. But there are
> > some circuit-breakers in the system, and in any case 'meltdown' is a
> > silly expression to use to describe the phenomenon. It's a lot more
> > like traffic congestion, an extensive traffic jam, or maybe gridlock.
> >
> > Please feel free to pass this on to whomever perpetrated a very poor
> > piece of promo text.
> >
> >
> > ["On mature reflection", the adjective 'vast' in the first line of my
> > third para. is under-researched hyperbole - which is what I'm
> > accusing the author of the blurb of doing. Just call me 'black pot'
> > ... ]
> >
> > [Declaration of interest: the reason I became aware of the 'Internet
> > Meltdown' segment is that I was interviewed for another segment
> > that's on tonight, on facial recognition technology. So feel free to
> > accuse me of blatant self-promotion (:-)} ]
> >
> > --
> > Roger Clarke http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/
> >
> > Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
> > Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
> > mailto:Roger.Clarke@xamax.com.au http://www.xamax.com.au/
> >
> > Visiting Fellow Department of Computer Science
> > The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 AUSTRALIA
> > Information Sciences Building Room 211 Tel: +61 2 6125 3666
> >
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