The biggest issue in the world of Pro Commerce is one that I nearly always forget.
I was reminded of my neglect when Alex told me about a recent phenomenon at his Internet company. The company has over a million users worldwide and just recently added advertising to the site for the first time.
Alex was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the anti-advertising anti-business email that poured in. When Alex looked at the details he found that the email was almost entirely from Europe, including many young people.
That
fact brought me back to reality. America is unique in the world
because we have gotten rid of our upper class. (For how we did it look
here.) Europe is class riven and maybe always will be. Business
sustains the class structure, as most young Europeans are able to see.
A few countries have less class structure, Holland, Denmark and a few
of the new East European countries. But highly stratified classes are
the rule in Europe and business, despite its need to reward merit,
hasn't made a dent in the class structure.
We Americans simply forget how different we are. Commerce has always been accepted, even respected in America, and still more so now that business is class free.
From Alex, I also note, that the rest of the world did not respond with hostility to new advertising on the website the way Europe did. That difference will take a lot more discussion because hostility to business is rooted in different loci in different cultures. The world has many tribal cultures, old classes (such as India), family and padrone structures that are quite different from European social classes.