Internet commerce makes or breaks a business depending on customer sensitivity, data privacy, the fit with business transaction systems already in place, good electronic work spaces and training programs, guaranteed delivery of goods and services, and transaction tracking. Mary J Cronin looks at net presences that have done well by accessing critical competitive and technical information, cutting costs, handling new marketing and sales demands, and increasing revenues and satisfaction among customers and employees. THE INTERNET STRATEGY HANDBOOK shows the successful information spread on the Internet by Dow Jones, Lockheed Martin, and Schlumberger; the successful net marketing by Digital Equipment Corporation and Millipor; and the successful research and development strategies by Genentech. Her book is a compelling read into all the possibilities with an Internet presence. It breaks ground with Simson Garfinkel's WEB SECURITY AND COMMERCE, Douglas Gerlach's THE COMPLETE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO ONLINE INVESTING, Mellanie Hills' INTRANET BUSINESS STRATEGIES, Harris Kern's MANAGING THE NEW ENTERPRISE, and Don Tapscott's THE DIGITAL ECONOMY.

This was a great disappointment. It says nothing new, it is a rehash, boringly written, and uninteresting in the way the book is laid out. It made me angry that I had been duped by the publicity. I would have returned it if I could be bothered. To be avoided!!

While the New Economy has forced businesses, large and small, to re-evaluate their core value proposition, few have been able to truly leverage the internet to enable greater economic value. It seems that managers are promoting all things "e", but internet initiatives rarely yield any added value. In Unchained Value, Internet expert Mary Cronin argues that these corporations will fail at e-business as long as they continue to use the traditional value chain as the strategic model for the enterprise. She introduces a new model based on the Traci model for organizations which she calls the digital value system -focused not on static, internally focused "chains" but on dynamic, external webs of relationships that take full advantage of the power, flexibility, and opportunity of the digital arena. According to Cronin, four factors define the new value system of digital businesses: (1) collaborating with multiple players outside the firm based on real time information pooling; (2) mastering dynamic pricing for digital marketplaces; (3) establishing customer trust and lifetime increasing returns through a proactive balance of privacy and personalization; and (4) providing essential, relationship-based online services that can be delivered to customers on the fly.

This book will be useful to those executives who are looking to transform traditional business over longer cycles than perhaps the usual 'must do it now or die' hype. But for those who have read most of the books around on the e-revolution , skip this one you won't learn much new.

This is NOT another hindsight view of everyone's embarrassing faith in a New Economy or in eCommerce goldmines. You already know that dumb business ideas are likely to fail. Read this and you might begin to see what will WORK.

Successful business models will use internet technologies to transform how companies operate (not just how they buy and sell goods or services). Cronin's book is not going to tell you how to build the Next Big Thing, but it will help you recognize when you're in its vicinity. My own new venture already fits Cronin's "digital value system" factors. Maybe that's why our investors believe we'll become a billion-dollar company...

Failures on internet bankin

The rapid sublimation of the Internet into the commercial world has been nothing short of amazing, although in retrospect it seems like it was heading towards it all along. Early commercial networks like The Source and CompuServe had the right idea of providing information on the desktop on demand, but they were limited in both what they could offer and who they could offer these services to by both logistics and economics (namely establishing modem lines in every community, the need for the consumer to own a modem, etc.). The Internet, evolving at the same time, had the resources and the connections, but unless you were a government researcher or an academic, you weren't allowed access. The creation of the commercial backbone by CIX bridged the gap between these two worlds, and the advent of the World Wide Web has provided the needed graphical user interface necessary for almost anyone to utilize the connectivity. Businesses are no longer wondering if they should become part of the online world, but how to do so and in what form.

Mary Cronin does a good job in Doing Business on the Internet and More Doing Business in the Internet [1] of explaining what the "network of networks" offers businesses, mainly through the use of case studies of businesses who have already opened up an electronic storefront. Although this book is written and meant for managers and executives with little net experience, the case studies provide some insights even for long-time users. The methods of doing business on the Internet are fairly obvious--from moving customer service from one-to-one phone exchanges to the one-to-many exchange offered by newsgroups and updated online catalogs by FTP--but the case studies illustrate how these methods achieve results. This focus on the cost-benefit to the bottom line is what conservative managers are looking for before they dedicate resources to achieving an Internet presence.

The speed at which this part of industry is growing and changing is not lost, and can be best illustrated by the book itself. Published only last year, it has already been outdated in many areas. Mary Cronin spends a lot of time reassuring businesses that the "Acceptable Use Policy" of the National Science Foundation is no longer a hindrance to commerce on the Internet; this policy is hardly ever mentioned today, now that the commercial side is fully two-thirds of the Internet and growing daily. Cronin mentions the World Wide Web only in passing, while in the past year it has been the Web that has brought the Internet into the mainstream and will likely be the vehicle that the majority of Americans and the world will use to connect to businesses.

Change is hard to deal with, and grizzled net veterans are prone to reminisce about the "good ol' days" when business was not a part of the Internet. It is likely that older business managers have fond memories of their own of days when acronyms like HTML and FTP were not part of their marketing plans. But, as Cronin correctly observes, the future is in increased connection and communication in all aspects of our lives, and someone is likely to use it to make money. This book shows that some people already have and provides some excellent tips on how to follow their example.

I read the book in 2000,but this book was published in 1995. There are a lot of ideas not match today. But, this is not mean the book too old to read. I suggest if you have experiences about EC, you could read this book to rethink your step is correct or wrong. But, if your are a new person who want understand what EC is.the book maybe not good for you.