You hear a lot about how the Internet will make/already has made a change in the shopping experience. Usually, the comments are either so qualified, hedged, and otherwise dense that they could stop neutrinos, or so airy, hopeful, and content-free that they make soap bubbles look rigid. But I just heard one a bit ago that brought this idea a little into focus for me.

My partner and I were talking about our copy of Quicken, which we've had lo, these many years -- at least six or seven, I think -- and how sometimes it has some quirks that might suggest that it's time to upgrade. Now, being a computer guy, I know that software packages don't just wear out.... but being a computer user, I know that of course they do. So we agreed that we would look to see what the least expensive version was of Quicken that would do what we wanted. It would be nice if it did a little more -- like let us download directly from our banks, rather than have to key stuff in manually-- and it would be nice if it talked to Excel, too, or at least had better charting ability than our old version had. But our primary bank (which is owned by a computer company) hasn't quite figured out how to supply friendly and/or effective service via its web site; suggesting direct download to them is equivalent to asking for the keys to the vault. And our local bank is very heavily into pumping every possible nickel out of every transaction, so the idea that they'll just let us pipe in and grab our records in any useful format without charging for the privilege -- well, neither of us thought that would happen. So, we'll go with Quicken Basic (which will still have more bells and whistles than we want, and more pop-up ads, too).

But the thing that crystallized the Internet shopping experience for me was when my partner looked at me and said 'We can get this over the net, right? We don't have to go a store and actually buy the box?'

Maybe this Internet thing is worth it, after all.