Information Technology - and print

The latest edition of Yellow Pages was delivered to the block of offices where I work last week. They were dumped in the hallway in their plastic shrink-wraps in a high column. I expected the pile to go down slowly - but a week later it hasn't gone down at all. Nobody wants this free1200 page compendium of local business contacts. Why? Because we can get all we need on the Internet. Even my less-savvy neighbours now say 'I did a search on Google'. It can be for anything from the opening time of a local resaurant to the diagnosis of an illness, from an Amazon purchase to the details of a hotel where a friend is staying in southern France for a week. The lesson is quite plain. Everyone in business is or should be on the Web these days. Not to be so is commercial suicide. And old-fashioned print publication compendiums such as Yellow Pages are a thing of the past. They are expensive to produce, they will never be smack up to date, they are unweildy and take up space .