Every Game Has Rules

The practices and tactics I advocate in The Online Rules of Successful Companies certainly can't guarantee success, but if you apply them correctly you will have a much better chance of making money on the Internet than you'll have if you don't follow them. Most of the basic "rules" in this book apply to any size company, anywhere in the world, whether the Internet itself is its central profit focus or it is a business that operated successfully for decades or even centuries before the word "online" became part of our vocabularies.

It doesn't matter whether you are an individual entrepreneur working from home or an executive for a multi-national corporation; it is as easy for a large company to put up a bad site as it is for a small company to put up a good one. Any size business can overspend on its Internet presence or have unrealistic expectations for it, and any size business can use the Internet as a tool to reach more customers, at lower cost, than it can reach through any other communications medium ever developed if it uses the Internet correctly.

I have worked hard to avoid programming jargon in this book. It is about the business of the Internet, not its technical aspects. I mention terms like "bandwidth" and "information layering" when they are appropriate, but their meanings should be obvious from context for almost anyone who has ever browsed a Web site or sent and received email.

On the other side of the coin, programmers and Web developers who don't have a lot of business knowledge shouldn't be intimidated by this book, either. Most of the business advice in The Online Rules of Successful Companies is nothing but old-fashioned common sense applied to a new medium, and shouldn't be hard to understand even though a lot of people seem to have trouble realizing that business on the Internet is still business, that advertising on the Internet is still advertising, and that the basic rules of customer service apply online the same way they apply in a "brick-and-mortar" store where clerks wait on customers in person.