Even as the FedEx area existed now, however, it was serving customer needs well. Yes, I appreciated the flash of MCI’s efforts, and I understood why Darlene and friends were attracting many more people than the courier company was right now. But compared to MCI, FedEx left me feeling _better_. Those modest little electronic forms, the ones that would let me track packages and check out Ex’s service availability by location and time, treated the customers as individuals and responded in seconds. MCI, however, ignored Bob Lilienfeld, who, disgusted, later sold his stock. On top of everything else, MCI, which had vastly more programming talent than FedEx did, had missed out on some major opportunities for interactive software. I could imagine a small company keying in a description of its telecommunications and network requirements and getting a series of at least basic recommendations. On a package-by-package basis and in the most private of ways, FedEx was doing this already—since its forms queried you about your shipping needs of the moment and then told you what services were available. The people at MCI weren’t dumb. They could turn around their operation in a flash—they might have done so by the time you read this—but in terms of customer service FedEx was clearly the winner right now. “Five years from now,” said Robert Hamilton, “35 or 40 percent of the customers connected to FedEx could be using the Internet.” His company stood a good chance of saving millions in annual communications costs and the expenses of staffing phones. “The big factor is how individuals are connected today,” he said. “With CompuServe and America Online galloping in the direction of the Internet, maybe that will happen sooner rather than later.” FedEx would let customer usage, not official corporate policy, drive its use of the Net, and that is exactly how it should be. One way or another the Net would definitely figure in its plans. The only question was, “How much?” The big need now, of course, was for customers to be able to key in their account numbers and get immediate pickups. FedEx did face some challenges here. FedEx needed to blend the Internet into its existing network of computers, and this complicated the security issues. FedEx wanted to make certain that a cyberthief couldn’t go on a joyride with an illegally obtained account number of a customer. So it was evaluating security-enhanced software from CommerceNet, a California organization that helped put businesses on the Net. Meanwhile, we customers could not use the Net to schedule shipments through Federal Express. FedEx had offered a temporary solution: we could at least download software that let us call up the company directly, or we could reach FedEx via America Online or another commercial network. That would do for the moment.