RE: To get things started....

["William J. Kammerer" <wkammerer@foresightcorp.com>]

Todd Boyle says "if Ray Walker is right, then every day we goof off here
in Core Components is costing the world $10 billion!"

Again, as usual, Todd is engaged in specious logic.  The memo at
http://www.unece.org/press/pr2001/01trade04e.htm says "The international
trade transaction costs in the world amount to $ 3 trillion and they can
be substantially reduced - by up to 60%..."   Todd, a whiz at numbers,
should consider - as a sanity check - that the Gross National Product of
the entire U.S. is less than $10 trillion before going off on tangents.
Perhaps Ray was exaggerating. Or more likely, he was including in the
transaction costs the shipping costs which e-commerce will have no
effect on until we have those Star Trek transporters.

The experts in international trade, at Bolero, cite the UN when they say
"7% of the $6 trillion in international trade each year is swallowed up
by the paper trail of administrative costs."  See
http://www.bolero.net/news/pressrel/septlaunch.php3.  This makes more
sense, and gives us a theoretical maximum of $420 billion that could be
whittled down with e-commerce.

Of course, in reality, you'd never see that much in savings because the
information exchange still has to occur: much of it would end up as an
income transfer from the paper shufflers of the world to the B2B
vendors. But you wouldn't hear me complaining.

William J. Kammerer
FORESIGHT Corp.
4950 Blazer Pkwy.
Dublin, OH USA 43017-3305
+1 614 791-1600

Visit FORESIGHT Corp. at http://www.foresightcorp.com/
"accelerating time-to-trade"