Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs Book

God forbid that doing business and making money on the Internet should bear any resemblance whatsoever to the past millennium of capitalism before our clunky bricks-and-mortar marketplace started going virtual--that would be too easy. Nope, it's a whole different ballgame now, and the new rule is: adapt or die. At least that's the message behind Digital Capital.From the three principles at cyber consultant Alliance for Converging Technologies (one of whom, Tapscott, authored the bestsellers The Digital Economy and Growing up Digital), the book's pet paradigm for global takeover is what they call the business web, or "b-web" for short--in their words, "strategically aligned, multi-enterprise partner networks of producers, suppliers, service providers, infrastructure companies and customers that conduct business communication and transactions via digital channels." In our words, that's more like an eBay, a Cisco, a Dell, an MP3.com, a Linux ...in short, any enterprise that a) knows how to form lateral partnerships with other goods- or service-providers, and b) eliminates the role of planes, trains and automobiles--not to mention lots of time, money and human energy--by doing almost everything over the 'Net. Not only do the authors provide a wealth of b-web case studies (including Schwab, Priceline, Webvan, AT&T Solutions and OptiMark in addition to those mentioned above), they outline in the latter part of the book a step by-step process for "weaving" a b-web of one's own.Too often,Digital Capital's smart, sound ideas come marinated in think tank jargon so alienated from plain English as to be near-impenetrable. Consider: "Disaggregation leads to 'disintermediation' and 'reintermediation'", which, believe it or not, isn't a line French film theorists use in pick-up bars, but the simple fact that business webs manage to cut out a lot of the traditional intermediary steps between producers and customers--now why couldn't they just have said that? After you nibble through the self-important MBA-ese, you'll find a smart look at how online shops are rewiring early-21st century capitalism.--Timothy Murphy, Amazon.comRead More