Endnotes

¹ B-to-B, B-to-C and B-to-G stand for business-to-business, business-to-consumer and business-to-government, respectively.

² The Internet infrastructure layer is composed of organizations that provide internet services. The Internet applications layer provides support systems for the Internet economy ranging from web-page design to security. The intermediary layer is composed of companies that are involved in the market-making process of the Internet (Barua et al., 1999).

³ Virtual communities (e.g., WebMD/Healtheon), significant reductions in transaction costs (e.g., electronic marketplace), gainful exploitation of information asymmetry (e.g., Priceline.com) and value-added market-making processes (e.g., providing third-party trust or authentication) are four possible value streams. The six revenue streams that are hard to replicate in a brick-and-mortar setup include increased margins over brick-and-mortar operations, revenue from online seller communities, advertising, variable pricing strategies, revenue streams linked to exploiting information asymmetry and free offerings. The logistic streams include dis-intermediation, infomediation, and meta-mediation.

⁴ Attributed to Allen and Morton (1991) and Zuboff (1988)

⁵ Especially the design model that sees strategy as a fit of strengths/weaknesses and opportunities/threats. The central idea is that planning and design of the strategy precedes implementation.

⁶ This is closer to the emergent model of strategy where strategy emerges as a part of its operationalization. The premise here is that the full strategy can not be known in advance and that it evolves and crystallizes as a response to a firm's adaptive behavior to external forces.

⁷ For instance, when indicating dealers to adopt high-speed Internet connections, Ford is mindful of strained factory-dealer relations in the past. Hence, Ford's approach to getting dealers to adopt high-speed Internet access is in the form of a suggestion. "While there has been no edict to our dealers that they have to have high-speed Internet, it has been very strongly recommended," said Dave Rayner, Ford's senior manager of dealer and vehicle systems. "But it's not confrontational at all" (Kisiel, 2002).

⁸ Brandwise.com was Whirlpool's e-commerce (business model) strategy to sell directly to the consumers their ideal refrigerator and connect to a nearby retailer.

⁹ Strategic alliances formed primarily as part of an e-commerce strategy.

¹⁰ Cisco's Pat Frey, Manager of Supply Chain Operations describes the problem of sharing information between supply chain partners when she says, "We've run into quite a bit of resistance. Lots of people just aren't ready to start sharing information on this level" (Barros et al., 1998). This is similar to the problem between Ford's suppliers and Ford. If the distribution channel doesn't trust the intentions of the manufacturer you can bet they will resist sharing their most valuable assets, i.e., customer intelligence.