Cambridge Business Association
Architects of the Business Revolution
Book

Architects of the Business Revolution

The Ultimate E-Business Book

Des Dearlove and Stephen Coomber
Capstone, 2001
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Authors Des Dearlove and Stephen Coomber present capsule biographies of 50 individuals who have played a major role in the spread of e-business. Besides providing some background on each person, these bios highlight their major contributions as individuals or through their companies. While many names and stories are familiar - Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates - others are less so, such as the developers of Google and Real Networks. The bios mix high-tech contributors, entrepreneurs and journalists covering the e-business revolution. Though the book has a brief introduction, it suffers from its alphabetical listing of the contributors, which presents the bios out of context. getAbstract says this book is a useful encyclopedia of the selected individuals and a valuable e-resource.

Summary

The Revolutionary Growth of the Internet

The roots of the Internet go back to the early technologists who made it possible, such as Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web. Yet, while the Internet started a revolution in today’s economy, in a broader context, it is one of many technological revolutions that have transformed society over the last 500 years.

Each technology revolution has provided a competitive free-for-all for entrepreneurs, an opportunistic struggle where the strongest eventually survive. This happened with canals, railroads and the automobile. Each boom produced a rush - for example, between 1910 and 1920, some 150 companies manufactured autos. However, the introduction of Internet technology has proceeded more rapidly than the advent of other technologies. For instance, it took 36 years for the telephone to reach 10 million people. The Internet garnered 10 million users in two years and has more than 300 million now.

The Three Waves of E-Commerce

Once the Internet became open to commerce in the mid-1990s, the first wave of e-commerce was like a "land-grab" in which companies raced to "occupy empty territory" online. This race...

About the Authors

Des Dearlove is co-founder of the media content, concepts and consulting firm, Suntops Media. He writes regularly for the Times, the American Management Review and Human Resources. He is the author of a number of books on management practice, including The Ultimate Book of Business Thinking and Business the Bill Gates Way. Stephen Coomber  writes for a variety of publications, including Internet Money magazine. He is author of Heart and Soul, a report on corporate values.

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