Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Non-Tech : The Critical Investing Workshop -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: abuelita who wrote (33829)	11/29/2000 8:33:58 PM
From: abuelita	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 35685

My dose of Vitamin B - from my broker. "November 29, 2000 Getting Down to e-Business While the media and many analysts focus on the shakeout in the B2C dot com sector, we think it's a perfect time to point out that the e-business revolution is gathering force. Yes, that's right-e-business momentum is accelerating. If we are correct in our assessment of the future, the e-business revolution will make B2C dot com business activity over the past five years look like a drop in the bucket. According to two recently released studies, one by Jupiter Research and another by the Gartner Group, e-marketplaces and the revenue they generate are proliferating even faster than originally predicted. Jupiter estimates that there will be approximately 1,200 exchanges operating by the end of this year and some 5,000 will be in place by the end of 2002. Talk about a Cambrian explosion! While most of the e-business activity has been in America, e-marketplaces are beginning to take off overseas. Companies in Europe and Japan are moving more quickly than originally expected. The acceleration in the pace of e-business evolution is not surprising. As we have written many times before, the cost advantages of e-businesses are profound (General Electric CEO Jack Welch says you have to feel the same way about the Internet as you do about breathing). The Internet is not simply a new distribution channel, as some have argued. Rather, it is, as author and journalist Frances Cairncross pointed out recently, many things: a market place, an information system, a tool for manufacturing goods and services. As Cairncross notes, the Internet makes a difference to a whole range of things that managers do every day, from locating a new supplier to coordinating a product to collecting and managing customer data. Each of these, in turn, affects corporate life in many different ways. The changes that the Internet brings are simply more pervasive and varied than anything that has gone before. Even electricity did not promise so many new ways of doing things. At the root of these changes is a dramatic fall in the cost of handling and transmitting information. Almost every business process involves information in some form: an instruction, a plan, an advertisement, a blueprint, a set of accounts. Inventory can be described as the physical embodiment of bad information. All this information can be handled and shared far more cheaply than before. Cairncross notes that many managers began to think seriously about the Internet only once the millennium-bug scare was over (that is, in the first quarter of this year). Most large American companies started to develop their Internet strategies just one year ago. As a result, the benefits will begin to show up only in next year's accounts and thereafter. Indeed, a survey conducted earlier this year by the National Association of Manufacturers found that more than two-thirds of American manufacturers did not use the Internet for business-to-business commerce. If that is true for the United States, it is true in spades for the rest of the world. A telltale sign that we are only in the very early stages of the e-business revolution comes from informal surveys of software companies by Andrew McAfee, a Harvard Business School professor. When McAfee visits companies, he asks them to complete the sentence, "the business-to-business revolution is x% complete. The biggest number he has heard is 5%. Many say 1%. With only 1% or the e-business revolution behind us, we have 99% of the way to go. It's early days folks, but we have little doubt that when it's over, the e-business revolution will be the biggest revolution in business that history has ever seen. Steve Waite and Max Jacobs "