Internet and World Wide Web

By now it's almost cliché to take note of the Internet's vast potential as a business resource, but triteness doesn't diminish the fact that this once-obscure computer network has changed—and will continue to change—business and society profoundly. A number of estimates pegged the value of Internet commerce in 1998 around $100 billion for the United States, and more than one projection for the early 2000s foresaw worldwide e-commerce surpassing a trillion dollars within the first five years of the 21st century. Although much attention has been devoted to the vast consumer market accessible via the Internet (which is a multibillion-dollar franchise in its own right), business-to-business transactions make up the large majority of e-commerce sales in terms of value. Total U.S. 1998 economic activity surrounding the Internet, including computer hardware purchases, Web authoring services, commerce, and so forth, was estimated at more than $300 billion in sales and 1.2 million jobs. And these statistics don't even address the non commerce efficiencies and savings that Internet-based technologies bestow on businesses in areas such as supply-chain management.

Whereas during the Internet's early commercialization companies were consumed with simply getting online, perhaps without much forethought about what to do once they got there, increasingly corporations are formulating exacting Internet strategies to capitalize on the network's strengths as well as to cope with its shortfalls. Despite the popular metaphor of a virtual store serving all the same functions as a physical store, conventional transaction-based commerce is not the appropriate Internet business model for all companies. Rather, businesses must evaluate the financial and competitive advantages of using the Internet as a primary vehicle for communication and exchange versus traditional and hybrid options. Some firms may find, for example, that it's more profitable to provide users with Internet tools to help make a purchasing decision than to try to facilitate the entire transaction electronically. Meanwhile, other types of companies will find that doing business exclusively over the Internet is the best approach. No blanket policy is likely to work across dissimilar business lines; the key to determining which model is best is intricately tied to the specific market being served, the logistics of delivering the product or service being offered, and what other non-Internet alternatives exist.