Death of the Middleman
By Michael Swaine
"He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back...." says Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, trying to paint a little glamour onto his dismal profession. When they do start not smiling back, Willy realizes that a smile can be about as deep as a shoeshine.
We need some millennial Miller now to mark another passage: the death of the middleman.
This demise has been predicted, often gleefully, ever since the birth of the Mosaic browser. So why take it seriously now? You know the argument: Travel agents, insurance agents, financial brokers, real estate agents, and other middlefolk have traditionally provided a service that is largely informational, bridging an info gap between producers and consumers. But as producers forge direct electronic links with their customers and their customers get their hands on do-it-yourself tools for finding and evaluating products and services, all those agents and brokers find themselves either out of work or competing with software.
And software is better at this stuff. Middlemen grease the gears of commerce, but e-commerce is theoretically friction-free. That's the idea, but of course we haven't yet achieved the holy frictionless market. However, middlemen can't take much consolation in the current market, because pressure from both producers and consumers is increasing. Producers that have invested heavily in e-commerce are realizing that survival is at issue, and the massive efficiencies that the Internet affords make a big difference in determining survival.
