Chapter 1 - The Future

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The Future	59

books. Amazon does not own a shop, but its 1998 Internet sales reached $610 million. Still to turn a profit by the start of 1999, it had already assembled the world's biggest personal database of readers' book preferences.
   Contact www.ImagineRadio.com on the Web, select your favorite music styles and artists, and Imagine Radio will create your own private on-line radio station, with programs personalized for your taste. It will keep updating your own personalized radio station from the newest hits selected to suit your profile.
   Select www.CDnow.com and, from your listed preferences, it will provide you with a personalized selection from around 375,000 different music tracks and songs: a separate music service for each of its 600,000 customers.
   Select www.garden.com and Garden Escape provides an on-line nursery just for you. File your zip code and flower preferences, and it will tell you exactly when to plant what. You can even use its on-line software to landscape your home.
   www.autoweb.com arranges sales of 30,000 cars a month, totalling $660 million a year, by matching sellers with specific buyers.
  Some estimates are forecasting that revenue from Internet sales will reach $327 billion by 2002. And the trend will affect education as much as business. It is creating new forms of organization that will transform both.

5. The new service society

   Peter Drucker, John Naisbitt, Kenichi Ohmae, Robert Reich, and many other forecasters all agree the next trend: the move from an industrial to a service society.27 Naisbitt again: "When I got out of college in the fifties, 65 percent of the workforce in America was blue-collar. Now it's down to about 13 percent, and its falling. That doesn't mean we're producing less. In fact, around 24 percent of America's gross national product is in manufacturing, about the same as it has been every year for 40 years. The difference is that 40 years ago 65 percent of the workforce was manufacturing these products, and today only 13 percent. Now obviously that 24 percent represents many more products as our economy has grown tremendously. The big change is: we're now manufacturing with information, rather than people - with computers,

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