Potter: Disintermediate Technology

Trust Key to Spreading Technology... The paradox of technology is that the most successful technology companies are the ones that make technology invisible. Take Microsoft. The Justice Department may not be to happy about it, but how many of us with day jobs have the time and motivation to find, research, choose and install the various browser, e-mail, spreadsheet, contact management and word processing applications when Office 2000 is a click away? Have you ever seen an AOL commercial talk about technology? AOL ("the Internet on training wheels") isn't faring too badly.

In commercial real estate the assumption has been that the technology application that makes road pizza out of the broker will be the winner. But after four years, millions of dollars and hundreds of e-initiatives to automate the locating, valuing, buying, building, leasing, financing, documenting, procuring, managing, maintaining, broad banding and selling real estate, obvious winners have yet to emerge. Why? Perhaps it is because the avalanche of choices is overwhelming real estate practitioners who don't have the "bandwidth" to evaluate the dozens of alternatives within each of these segments. These people don't want technology. They need solutions.

The real winner could be the real estate professional who disintermediates technology. That is, the "survivor" will be the company, probably one that already has a trust relationship with the client, that takes it upon itself to find the alternatives, pick the best, extensively train its people and bundle all of that into a seamless real estate service company. In other words, make technology invisible to users who just want things easier, faster, better and cheaper. But who can and will assume leadership in such a fragmented industry? Entrepreneurial alliances? Brokers? Consultants? Consortia? Microsoft? ... What do you think? Send e-mail to me at bpotter@pikenet.com.

PikeNet Expo News... Want to find out more about a particular company? Currently the following firms will host hour-long Meet-the-Players sessions: CapitalThinking, DealMover.com / MyContracts.com, RexOffice, The REALM, UrbanMedia, VirtualPremise, AvidXchange, Business Integration Group, EquityHound, ManagePath, Property Capital and Struxicon. We still have room for a few more companies. If you're interested, please contact Eileen Circo at ecirco@pikenet.com. Times are shown in the right-hand column of the Expo Schedule.

--Bob Potter