Purchasing furniture over the web is a classic example. The items shown are typically standard sizes, such as a dining room table, bookcase, or couch. In theory, it should be possible to change the dimensions, but this moves rapidly to >custom= furniture manufacturing, which is not an >out of box= experience. Custom manufacturing might be as simple as selecting height, width, and depth for bookcases, or as difficult as a hand drawn entertainment center for your new 80" flat-screen TV.

Followed to it=s natural conclusion, order-entry websites are fundamentally Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems, and CAD systems are fundamentally order entry systems. If you are designing a boxcar with a CAD system one assumes that plenty of sheet metal and steel beams will be purchased in the realization of the actual product. If you aren’t actually going to make one, then obviously you are working for Hollywood or Madison Ave.

Working in Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, or Microsoft Visio is not all that unreasonable for most people, although the latter starts getting into CAD which is an area many people find difficult. Such programs cost from $400 to $999, so while not cheap they are >reasonable= for people who are graphics artists or other geniuses. AutoCAD and Solid Edge, however, are fundamentally 3D systems and are priced to match, running anywhere from $3500 to $5000 - before the special add-on modules for particular industries. The combination of price and difficulty makes this a domain for experienced professionals.

Ikea has a kitchen designer one can download for arranging cabinets and appliances, and it has prices which are >current= until about three months from the download date. This system can render views in 3-D, so that the buyer can walk around in their kitchen. She won=t, however, be feeling the heat.

 eMachineshop.com is a great site for punching out cookie cutters. It bills itself as a place where mere mortals can design parts and have them made, presumably for their battlebots. The user downloads a design program, and then draws what they want. The drawing application includes price estimation. One clicks >submit= and off it goes, along with (depending on what you=re doing) your life savings.

Designing a kitchen with predefined components and designing at the part level are one thing, but real design is the integration of many levels of subassembly. People like the idea of sketching their dream house, but the devil is in the details, and there are jillions of those. One is reminded that people get paid to keep track of that stuff, and you can see why it turns into a profession.

So far, I haven=t seen a homebuilding website where you can lay out a floor plan, select from various architectural styles, get a rendering of the home in a 3-D walk around, and get a construction estimate. A search on Google lists plenty of custom home builders, and plenty of completed plans for sale, but nothing in the way of >design it yourself= on the spot. There are CD/disk based design programs available for dirt cheap, but a custom homebuilder doesn’t host them.

Most of my friends that have built houses have started out throwing in the kitchen sink, or perhaps more precisely the wainscoting, upper and lower decks, ionic columns running the length of the front porch, and hot tub. After this is said and done, the price turns out to be $250K over budget, so what ends up getting built is a vast amount of space enclosed in off-white sheetrock. Even the three-car garage idea is abandoned.

Designing something like this hosted out of a builder=s website would probably be asking for trouble, since they would periodically remind you that mortgage rates are below 6%,... for right now. The only builder that could afford to host something like this would have to be building thousands of homes. That might describe tract house developments, but this is a bit distant from fully custom homes.

It should be possible to use the 3D Cad systems, in some form, over the web, hosted by people who hope to snag your business. This is probably a reach for the CAD companies, who have a hard enough time supporting people that are formally trained in their software. This reflects back on the user, who is lucky to print out a holiday card with a border of colored lights.

The user mindset is to buy the most customizable product available >off the shelf=. Don=t complicate the discussion with an excess of questions: just read my mind. This gets progressively more difficult as interface menus and physical space separate the buyer and the vendor.

We notice that Wal-Marts and other big-box retailers seem to be replacing really huge stores with giant stores. C-5A aircraft hangars are, in comparison, not affected by the curvature of the earth. Despite this, we still can’t find any good socks, although the Harley under shorts are a scream. Store size becomes a function of differentiation: first you have shelves, then you have steel shelves, wire shelves, plastic shelves, glass-top shelves, white plastic shelves, tan plastic 18" ventilated shelves, and so on. All these >choices= occupy volume.

It=s bewildering to filter down through hundreds of thousands of potential choices through a browser. However, the physical store is now the same experience, with the addition of sore feet.