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By now, most people have some idea of what the Internet is all about, at least as users at home.

And - of course - the Internet is also making a tremendous impact on business in the USA, particularly on the share price of companies who've added .com to their name.

The torrid rise in the shares of companies associated with the Internet has created what looks like a bubble about to burst. Especially when a profitless upstart such as the Seattle-based Internet bookstore Amazon.com is now worth as much as the US's two largest bricks and mortar book chains - Borders and Barnes and Noble - put together.

Cautious response

Perhaps it's the fear of the US Internet share price bubble bursting that has made British businesses very cautious about the impact of the Internet. But cautious they are, as shown in a recent survey from the Institute of Directors and Oracle, the second largest computer software company in the world.

The survey shows less than 2% of the respondents think there's any kind of competitive threat from the Internet, a much lower figure than any other developed country. "An alarming finding," says Tim Melville-Ross, director general of the Institute of Directors.

Half the British respondents to the survey thought they themselves were sufficiently prepared for the new technology, but at the same time, only 15% of them thought that other British companies were prepared.

"There's a sense that it doesn't really matter to the UK," adds Tim Melville-Ross. "But of course it does."

Wake-up call

Oracle and IBM add their voices to the Internet wake-up call in Radio 4's In Business programme which will be broadcast at 2030 local time on Monday.

IBM's UK chairman Carl Symon says his company did $7bn worth of business with suppliers on the Internet last year, and that figure will double in 1999.

Philip Crawford, Oracle's UK MD, says : "UK plc is asleep."

As the Amazon.com example suggests, the businesses particularly in the firing line are the intermediaries: retailers, car dealers, and travel agents. Their survival may be at stake.

The Internet is already overturning a century of established relationships between manufacturers and their retail outlets. Some American clothes makers with their own websites are selling directly to the public - not only that, they're also barring their official dealers from putting some of the same merchandise on their own web sites.

Industrial revolution

This means that taking Internet retailing seriously may overturn many of the assumptions on which existing businesses have been based. The coming of the Internet may be the same dislocating experience for established businesses as was the advent of the railways or electric power, the telephone or the supermarket.

And anyone, anywhere can operate on a global scale from day one of establishing a new e.business.