MIT Sloan Management Review

Management of Technology and Innovation, Operations Management and Research

 

The Future of E-Business

By Thomas W. Malone

July 15, 2002

Countless real-world experiments will drive e-business innovation during the next five years, and academic researchers will contribute to this process by accelerating the rate at which businesses learn from each other’s experiments.

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At a recent e-business research meeting, I was asked the following questions: “Five years from now, what will be happening with the Internet, and what breakthrough research projects in e-business will have contributed to the changes?”

My (intentionally provocative) answer was: “Lots of good things will happen, butnone of them will be enabled by research breakthroughs.” To understand my thinking, let’s look at the present from the perspective of the not-too-distant future.

The View From 2006

One thing I clearly remember about the early years of this century was the big e-business backlash. For a while in the 1990s, people thought that any business with “.com” at the end of it or the lettere in front of it was an automatic license to make millions! With such wildly unrealistic expectations, we shouldn’t have been surprised to see a backlash that was almost as silly and extreme in its disillusionment as the original expectations had been in their blind faith. For a time during the backlash, people thought anything related to the Internet or the New Economy was doomed to failure.

Eventually, the disillusionment worked its way out of the system. I think it was sometime in ’02 or ’03 when the last of the “e-business is dead” stories appeared. In fact, people generally have stopped talking about e-business altogether. Today, the term e-business sounds about as silly as... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

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