Romulus Pereira of Cabletron
Ask Peter Howard, a vice president at the highly successful Ross-Simons what his company’s retail stores are likely to look like in the future, and he’ll tell you a showroom, where customers make their actual purchases on-line. Ross-Simons, a high end jewelry and gifts retailer that first succeeded with strong store sales, improved that with an aggressive catalog division, and now has seen its e-commerce site gaining considerable momentum, is in the middle of a movement that some see as simply changing “our lives in a fundamental way.”
That’s how Romulus Pereira sees it. He’s the chief operating officer of Cabletron System, the New Hampshire based technology business that grew from its beginnings in a garage to a multi-billion dollar business.
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”The ’90s is the decade of the Internet,” Pereira told an audience at a breakfast session at the recently completed ITEC show at the Rhode Island Convention Center. “It is changing our lives in a fundamental way, much like the printing press was life altering.”
While the printing press was instrumental in helping combat illiteracy through the mass production of books, the Internet has provided easy access to information, with speed and at low cost, Pereira said.
”It (the Internet) not only changes the way we conduct business, but changes the way we work, live and play,” he said.
The latest phenomena is e-commerce, predicted, Pereira said to grow from $15 billion a year to $970 billion by the year 2002.
It is the latest in what he said are important inflection points in the development of technology, from local area networking to the World Wide Web and global collaborative possibilities, to the age of e-commerce, and next, he suggested would be the convergence of voice, video and data.
Now, however, is the time for the development of e-commerce. “On-line retail may put the superstores out of business or change the playing field,” he said, allowing the purchase of virtually anything on-line, including groceries that are promised to be fresher and cheaper than you can buy at the corner supermarket.
“I’m not sure how good this is for social progress,” he said, but suggested that the Internet is “now the salesperson, the mall, all wrapped up into one and you don’t have to worry about bad service.”
