Sometimes I feel that there should be no honours at all because beneath every shawl and garland there is an application.

Great read. Get drawn into it!

Go ye the e-way

IF YOU have wondered why most Internet businesses fail, Charles Birch has an answer in his new book Successful e-business strategy — the potential of electronic marketplaces. The flaw lies in believing that the basics of good business management and strategy are different on the Internet than they are in the physical world. Read on:

A customer's nirvana — with up to 80 per cent of total spending brought online and real-time inventory checks, quality data and supplier performance tabulations — is still only a distant hope.

For multi-customer marketplaces to work, good governance is needed to ensure that customers agree on the terms of their involvement and commit themselves to supply liquidity.

The challenge for users is how to sort through all the resources to find the quality offerings they require. Search engines are of only limited help; indeed, they have become part of the problem. Typically, a request for information on French wine will generate hundreds of citations, all of them relevant, but few offering reliable, high-calibre information.

Acquiring and retaining customers online means providing complete satisfaction from the initial promise to delivery of the product at the door.

The proliferation of outsourcing arrangements and the increasing expertise of delivery services using IT may mean that retailers risk losing their lock on consumer data.

E-businesses of sufficient size and experience tend to build their own facilities. Ten thousand orders a day would support an investment of $70 million in order-processing systems and a warehouse of one million square feet.

Information capture in online environments depends on the deployment of an array of technologies focused on measuring, tracking, collecting and analysing user activities on the network.

Existing players should ask themselves whether they possess the three key assets they need to become disintermediators, namely, brand depth, emotional bond and transaction intensity.

Content and services that have been successful on a traditional platform cannot just be mechanically shifted to a new one. They must be adapted. A newspaper, for example, is unlikely to prosper simply by putting its text and photos on the Internet. Instead, it needs to adapt its material — for example, by making it more searchable with `zoom in, zoom out' capabilities.

Zoom in on e-strategy!

(Books courtesy: East West Books (Madras) Pvt Ltd, Chennai. E-mail: ewb@vsnl.com)

Tailpiece

"They wanted to sell me an e-book, but I found it to be a c-book."

"A cook book?"

"No, a costly book."

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