TNJ - September 2002 - Feature Story -Chasm in Cyberspace Widens By Herb Boyd

September 2002

Chasm in Cyberspace Widens
Black Entrepreneurs Continue to Fall
Behind Technology Curve
By Herb Boyd

Steve Ballmer knows how to get an audience’s attention. When Ballmer, CEO and president of Microsoft Corp., said that less than two percent of African-American entrepreneurs possessed an e-commerce strategy, a loud murmur rippled across the vast auditorium at New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Center.

“With small business a key driver of American economic growth…ethnic small businesses must understand and embrace the new technology that can help them succeed in the digital decade ahead,” he said.

Ballmer’s message was not lost on those attending his keynote address at the two-day Blacks in Technology summit (www.blacksintechnology.com) at the Javits Center. He warned that too many black business people were falling behind the technology curve, thus widening the so-called “digital divide” in computer literacy and Internet access between whites and ethnic minorities.

In an interview with The Network Journal after his address, Ballmer said Microsoft was working to improve the e-commerce capabilities of minority firms and the access African-Americans have to computers. “Overall, we have dispensed some $30 million to minority banks across the nation, and the $9 million I mentioned during my speech is in addition to this sum,” he explained.

“We must overcome the digital divide in which only 56 percent of African-Americans work on personal computers, compared to 70 percent for white Americans,” he said. “And our industry is not doing a good job of reaching people.”

Ballmer’s points were accented by a colleague at a workshop at the Blacks in Technology event. “By 2004, all government procurement will occur online,” noted Martin Taylor, Director of Business Strategy at Microsoft. “So it’s a matter of priorities, and if they don’t get online, opportunities will be lost.”

According to several black technology experts, these online opportunities will provide an unprecedented amount of potential online sales revenue which is expected to spike at about $60 billion over the next couple of years.

Why are black businesses missing from the Internet? The reason is lack of awareness, said Don Rojas, CEO and founder of The Black World Today (www.tbwt.com), an online news and information center. “But the critical issue may be they are not convinced money can be made on the Internet. They hear all the horror stories about the failure of dot-com companies—even the major ones—and this news is obviously very discouraging,” he said.

Rojas, whose company has been on the Internet since 1996, spoke at length about the troubles a small, independent business faces trying to survive in cyberspace. “And this situation, particularly in the realm of available advertising for minority-owned firms, has taken even a deeper turn for the worst since Sept. 11,” he continued. Despite the gloomy picture, there are still more black businesses building websites and experimenting with this electronic medium, he said.

Increasing awareness of the Internet and its fiscal possibilities were some of the goals of the Blacks in Technology summit, which also made stops in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago. These urban areas were targeted by Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co. and other sponsors, who enlisted talk show host Tavis Smiley and his foundation to help spread the word.

“We can’t be road kill on the information superhighway,” Smiley asserted as he moderated a panel of leading African-American authorities on new technologies. He said that in order to “close the increasing chasm between the haves and the have-nots,” minority businesses can’t afford to wait much longer to purchase the tools they need to get online.

How does a business maintain itself once it has a presence on the Internet? “Unless you have an inexhaustible amount of risk capital, promotional funds, with considerably endowed sponsors, running a business solely online will be difficult,” said Victoria Jackson, an Internet consultant based in Detroit.

“Just getting the money owed to you by advertisers through electronic invoicing presents new problems,” said Jackson. “In short, it just takes you longer to get paid.”

During a recent forum sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists, it was reported that less than half of black newspapers are online. “And this figure may be a bit inflated. I’d be surprised if a third of them have a presence online,” Rojas observed. “Part of the problem for new people on the Internet is fear of being lost in the shuffle or else they are bothered by what they feel is a complexity of technology.”

Send a Network Journal Greeting Card With Music to a loved one or friend. In preparing to celebrate Black History Month (February) here in America, the theme of our greeting cards for the next two months will feature famous people of color from the last century.

The music to accompany the cards are Motown and Reggae songs.