If you're a college teacher, McGraw-Hill will make you a customized textbook of excerpts and articles that you choose from hither and yon. You tell the company how many students you have, and that's how many books are printed. Paris Miki, a Japanese-owned eyewear chain, makes rimless glasses on the spot, designing lenses and temples to conform to the shape of your face. With computerized databases and interactive communications, the theory goes, a preindustrial cosiness can be introduced into the modern marketplace. Indeed, companies can tailor not just their advertising, pricing, and service but, using modular manufacturing methods, their actual products to individual tastes and needs.
Nothing is built in advance.
Nothing is built waiting for an order to come. This remains to be seen. The company has set up a direct-sales Web site with a customized page that contains pictures of your model printer and computer, so you can order replacement ink or toner cartridges, among other accessories, without fuss. Behind all this attentiveness lies a great shift of power from sellers to buyers. American Airlines, using customized combinations of a few hundred modules of copy, has a Web site that looks different to each of about a million registered American Advantage flyers.