John Lamb's Week: The surreal world of market research

silicon.com inquisitors will be putting the multi-millionaire under the microscope on the future of free software. Young's appearance is part of a Linus week devoted to the flying Finn and Linux inventor Linus Torvalds.

The backlash against the ebusiness boom is in full swing, if a survey due out Tuesday is anything to go by. Research from Knowledge Accelerators claims that 80 heads of ecommerce in 100 consumer oriented UK companies say that online trading is not essential to their companies.

And if that isn't enough the chief operating officer of the consulting firm says he is glad to hear it. "Finally companies have realised that the best use of a website is to provide efficient and intelligent customer service to support the offline business," opines Mike Adams.

What a turn up for the books: in a matter of months we have gone from e-everything to e-nothing very much thank you. Only the travel business sees online trading as essential.

On average, respondents estimate that it will take over two years for at least three per cent of sales across all industries to be processed online, with a fifth not expecting to reach this goal for five years. The rate of internet penetration is the key. Respondents say they expect the number of their customers with internet access will grow to nearly three quarters in the next two years.

In the meantime, there is no shortage of companies cooking up software to help sell goods and services over the web more effectively. Wednesday sees the launch of bluparc, a company that will sell real time software for monitoring the response from web-based sales campaigns.

Founded by refugees from business intelligence firm MicroStrategy, bluparc's customer managed relationship environment will enable online marketers to look at responses to mailings to people's desktop or mobile systems as they come in and to make immediate changes if the message does not seem to be getting through.

bluparc says it has boiled down MicroStrategy's expensive big brother style customer grabbing programs into something affordable and which works in real time. Scary stuff, or on second thoughts maybe not if you belong to the hit and miss school of marketing.

Spurious research is always the last resort of a flagging marketing effort, so silicon.com tends to take the flood of paid-for surveys that cross our desks with a pinch of salt. However, you might be interested in a new take on email in a survey funded by information company KVS, full results of which will be announced mid-week.

KVS claims that people spend two hours per day managing their email (longer than they spend working?). More importantly, the firm will be arguing that companies should devote more time to thinking about how email is used by workers because it is now the primary means of storing important data about the organisation.

"The problem of archiving and retrieving email information is growing exponentially, amplifying the inefficiencies and inadequacies of current systems, and making manual storage and retrieval cost-prohibitive," KVS will warn journalists.

Come Thursday I may dust down my walking stick for a stroll over to the Dali Universe exhibition at County Hall opposite the House of Parliament where Silicon Valley high-tech law firm Morrison & Foerster - otherwise known as MoFo - will be holding a knees up. Until next week then.