Well, first of all its job is to persuade people to buy what you have to sell, and do it by being as glossy and seductive as possible and only telling people what you want them to know. You can’t interrogate a brochure. Most corporate websites are like that. Take BMW, for instance. Its Web site is gorgeous and whizzy and it won’t answer your questions. It won’t let you find out what other people’s experience of owning BMWs is like, what shortcomings any particular model might or might not have, how reliable they are, what they cost to run, what they’re like in the wet, or anything like that. In other words, anything you might actually want to know. You can e-mail them, but your question or their answer—or anybody else’s answer—will not appear on the site. Of course, there are plenty of Web sites where people do share exactly that kind of information, and they’re only a few clicks away, but you won’t find a word about them on BMW’s site. In fact, if you want proper, grown-up information about BMWs, the last place you’ll find it is at www.bmw.com. It’s a brochure.

Same with British Airways. It’ll tell you anything you like about British Airways flights except who else is flying those routes. So if you want to see what the choice is, you go instead to one of the scores of other sites that will tell you. Which is bad news for British Airways because they never get to find out what you were actually looking for, or how what they were offering stacked up against the competition. And because that is very valuable information, they have to send out teams of people with clipboards to try to find out, despite the fact that everybody lies to people with clipboards.

The people who have got this spectacularly right so far are the guys at Amazon. You go to their site because it’s awash with shared information. The more information there is, the more people go there, and the more people go there, the more information they generate, and the more books Amazon sells. Of course, they are not afraid of open debate because, unlike BMW, they are not responsible for the product they sell. It will take BMW and British Airways a long time and a big deep breath to realise that they are part of the community they sell to.