Yet I suspect these people have been overwhelmed by the complexities and traditions, for I sense a definite cooling of interest in distribution. Compounding or complementing this, there have been no eye-opening breakthroughs in logistics, supply chain management, or other elements.
  
No matter what innovative ideas people might have, they all hinge on technological and other hardware advances. Yet distribution hardware seems stuck in a 1970s rut. All of the handling and transport equipment technology is the same now as it was 30 years ago. Dreams of high-speed maritime transport, of underground transporter tubes, of fully automated warehouses, and of other breakthroughs have remained just that --  dreams. Either the technology was not there or the economies were wrong, but we are still where we were in the 1970s.
  
Yet come the IC tag. Basically, this involves storing the kinds of information in the bar code in an IC chip and embedding it in the product tag. Because were are talking IC, the information is both retrievable and rewritable. Lest you think this is another impossible dream, I hasten to add that such dynamic data use is already underway. And if diffusion can bring costs down, that should lead to further diffusion and still-lower costs.
  
What will this mean for your business? This is a dream that is coming true, and it time to be thinking about it.

  
Nakata Nobuya
Kanagawa University