THOSE PESKY ATOMS

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 236  06/03/2014

Foot-to-ground contact is pretty important to us motorcyclists so we get picky about our boots. I favour an Australian stockman's style that can pass for a fashionable Chelsea Boot in polite society. Having worn out my second pair of R.M.Williams after 15 years yesterday I went shopping for new. I checked Russell & Bromley and John Lewis on the web, then set off to town to try some on. Why didn't I buy online? Because I need to try boots on, and you can neither upload your feet nor download boots over the web, which still only handles bits, not pesky atoms. I'd never consider buying boots from Amazon, though I did go there after my purchase to snivel quietly about the £8 I could have saved...

Russell B's lovely boots were too narrow for my broad feet and John Lewis didn't have the ones advertised on their website, so I ended up buying Blundstones (which are fab and half the price of R.M.Williams) from the Natural Shoe Store. Later that day I realised there's a moral to this gripping tale, as I was reading John Lewis's announcement of its massive new IT project: an Oracle-based ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system that will completely integrate the firms' online and physical stores, including all the Waitrose grocers. No cost was quoted for this four-year project - scheduled to run in 2017 - but it will certainly be both expensive and risky.

Manufacturers have only a slightly better record than public-sector institutions when it comes to screwing up big IT: in recent years major corporations from Avon to Hershey and Levi's Jeans have lost fortunes botching or cancelling ERP projects. If anyone can pull it off it might be John Lewis, whose overall competence is renowned. It first pioneered Click & Collect, where you choose a product on the website and then collect it from your nearest store, though all its competitors now do the same. But C&C is only one permutation people use to bridge the bits/atoms gap. Some folk research products in the bricks-and-mortar store, then go home and order from the website. Some fear online shopping and prefer to order by phone from a human. As for browsing the site, they might use a mobile, tablet or a PC. Hence the new buzzword is "omni-channel", and it matters enormously because all of these modes of e-commerce will fail - like my boot purchase - if stock in stores isn't accurately reflected on the website. That demands a whole new level of integration of stock-control and delivery systems, which for a grocery operation like Waitrose that delivers perishable foodstuffs will be ferociously hard. The new project is ambitious indeed.

This is clearly the new frontline of online retailing. There are more and more items like TV sets, clothes, shoes, high-end acoustic musical instruments, possibly furniture and fabrics, that people won't be satisfied to buy from a purely online outlet like Amazon but need to see and touch before choosing. Admittedly a lot of people go to bricks-and-mortar stores to browse, then go home an buy from Amazon, but the stores are getting wise to this. I imagine that John Lewis's new system, assuming it works, is intended to make it so easy to buy-as-you-handle that you won't want Amazon. Meanwhile Amazon and Google are both leaking weirdly futuristic plans for delivering atoms rather than bits independently of the Post Office or courier service. Amazon's vision involves flocks of quadcopter drones, delivering your purchases down the chimney like the storks of legend. Google, with its feet more firmly on the ground, buys up robotics firms: I particularly like their galloping headless-heifer robot, which would make quite a stir as it rumbled round the corner into our street towing a sofa (especially if chased by a squawking flock of quadcopters... )

Omens are gathering that the power of silicon valley giants has peaked, just as the oil, coal and railway barons' power did in the 1900s: even the US Right is getting chippy about the amount of tax they avoid (which means taking more tax from civilians); among Democrats there are populist stirrings about their almost-jobless business model and exploitation of interns; and the San Francisco bus protests are seriously tarnishing their public image. And all that Kurtzweilian Transhumanist/Matrix/Singularity nonsense looks more and more like a religious cult, a post-modern reinvention of a Protestant Millennium. We might spend a lot of time watching movies and listening to music in bit-land but we're never going to live there full-time because we're made of atoms, we eat atoms, breath atoms and wear atoms. And bricks-and-mortar shops have a head start when it comes to distributing atoms in bulk: just watch them start the fight back.