Measuring Statistics

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by John Ginsberg

The Internet industry will be worth $100 billion by the year 2001. There will be 256 million users on the Internet by the year 2003. And at the rate I m gaining weight, I'll be 267kg by my 63rd birthday!

We have all seen the statistics. Everyday my inbox is flooded with newsletters from a variety of sources telling me how wonderful the Internet will be in the next five years. But it doesn't stop there. There are statistics on just about every conceivable subject from birthday parties to space explorations and beyond.

As an Internet consultant, the growth of the Internet industry is important information for me to work effectively. But for almost anybody else, the information is about as useful as the correct spelling of "floccinaucinihilipilification" - which by the way means "to categorize something as trivial or an estimation of something as worthless". It also seems to sum up my opinion of most Internet statistics quite nicely.

Yet I find myself curious as to why these vast resources of statistics are growing with increasing popularity.

It seems that there are more and more companies out there realizing the importance of collecting raw data from an avenue of new sources opened up to them by the now dominant use of the Internet. This leads me to my next logical question (and you're wondering what the first one was), what prompted such an explosion in the market research field?

It is common fact that effective decision-making relies upon having all the facts, and it makes sense that as your information-base increases, your ability to steer your company towards success increases proportionately.

Now I introduce to you, the INFORMATION age. The next step in the evolution of person (for political correctness' sake). The world is becoming smaller and companies and individuals who used to be competing against other companies in their own town, city and country are now up against the whole world.

There is only one way to stay on top of things and that would be to know more than all the other companies. Knowledge is power and the weak shall inherit the earth, because they spend their time gathering information and not exercising their muscles.

So who has all this valuable information? Who are we going to turn to, to provide us with insight regarding trends in buying patterns? Who has spent the formative years of the Internet gathering and organizing data from millions of Internet users? And who takes this information and translates it into an innumerable number of useless statistics?

The answer is easy. It is the same people that publish scores and scores of somewhat useless statistics that we very often overlook as worthless and a waste of hard drive space. BUT BE CAREFUL! Don't ignore their significance as arbitrary and do not dismiss them. Because your competitor won't.

As I see it, statistics, that for so long have been regarded by many as nothing more than meaningless numbers, are going to play a major role in the future of electronic business and they are here to stay. Embrace it as you have done the Internet and other e-business practices and you're guaranteed to stay on top. Dismiss it, and watch a once successful empire fall from ignorance.