InformationWeek

GE's Move To The Net

Plastics division offers Web access and customized software

By Clinton Wilder
Issue: 10/24/94

In one of the biggest corporate moves yet to harness the global reach of the Internet, General Electric Co.'s plastics division on Oct. 13 unveiled a plan to place reams of engineering data on the Net and sell software tools that can easily access the data.

GE Plastics isn't the first business to establish a World Wide Web server with a "home page" (a cover sheet for an online report), but it's the first to resell a custom ized version of a commercial Internet access tool, in this case Spry Inc.'s Internet In A Box. GE Plastics customers won't have to navigate the Net to find the company's home page. Instead, they can buy the tool and click on an icon.

The Internet content from GE Plastics, a $5 billion unit in Pittsfield, Mass., will feature 1,500 pages of product photos, diagrams, and charts. The Web server will also list internal electronic-mail addresses for GE Plastics contacts, and give customers access to product-design, plastics, automotive, construction, and computer equipment data.

Why The Web?
GE Plastics chose the Internet because of its size, rapid growth, and strong presence in the scientific and engineering community-even though GE Plastics' $60 billion parent company owns GE Information Services, operator of one of the world's largest value-added networks. GE Plastics' technical information resides on a server at GE's Schenectady, N.Y., research facility, and is customized for the Wor ld Wide Web, a network of servers that link hypertext documents on the Internet.

Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and other computer companies have set up similar Web servers to provide product and technical information to customers, but GE Plastics is the largest non-computer company to do so. Comments?