All these sites promise that if you just give them a credit card number, they'll deliver you a product faster, easier, and perhaps even cheaper than your local Wall-Mart. In that case, you're living in the early 1990s. The Internet has passed you by. A Critical Mass A critical mass of plutonium is the mass necessary to sustain a nuclear reaction. A critical mass in communications occurs when you have contact with enough customers to justify a large financial investment.
TV has that critical mass.
Now the Internet has that critical mass. There are millions of homes out there that have Internet access, and in the year 2000, it is feasible to spend a large amount of money to make even more money. And that's exactly what Apple has done. In fact, if you look at Apple's Internet strategy, you can see some basic Microsoft thinking there, namely, reach as many people as possible by dumbing down the product. Take iDisk for example.