THIS BOOK IS GOOD IF YOU'RE LOOKING AN INTRODUCTION ABOUT ALL THE TERMS AND MODELS FOR E-BUSSINES

I bought that book and was dismayed at the lack of help in starting my own internet business....he just threw around some techinical mumbo jumbo and called it a book, I hope he tries to write another book that is easier for normal people to read.

This fine (and fat) book is just the thing for people who currently trade online or those who are considering it. It provides a nice assortment of screen shots of useful sites to become familiar with and concludes each chapter with a concise summary in list format. The book is 823 pages long but still doesn't go far enough on specialist topics. But this book is a comprehensive and carefully constructed primer on the entire waterfront from Stocks to Bonds to Mutual Funds and of course to the particulars and precautions of setting up an account, making trades, gathering timely information etc. I like that it doesn't take an AOL-centric point of view because that would be too limiting. If you are interested in Online Investing, buy this book and supplement it with a subscription to "Online Investing" magazine (monthly) which would bring you up to date on new developments and also cover special topics with more depth.

each chapter give you a step to start an online Investment
it give you all small detail.
it can be a starter even for the beginner in Trading.

This book breaks Melbourne into shopping districts that can be covered in an afternoon or a day. Brief descriptions are sufficient to get a feel for whether you would be interested in visiting certain stores, or even whole districts, so that you can more efficiently plan your trip. Hours of operation are included. Colorful pictures of the interior of stores and their merchandise are helpful, but a relative indicator of prices (like a 1 to 5 dollar sign system) would be extremely helpful. Also, mileage indicators on the maps would be a big plus.

Michelle Matthews has unearthed a pot-pourri of alternative venues for the discerning consumer. Street smart and shopping savvy, this book oozes class and cuts a swathe through similar projects aimed at a peculiar niche. Its light, breezy treatment and contemporary pace only hastens the buyer's decision-making process. What a Mecca Melbourne is! Roll on San Francisco, London...Moscow!

At first glance, Tech-Venture seems like a nostalgic flashback to early 2000. A quick skim through its pages reveals statements like: "Old economy valuation methods, such as discounted cash flows and comparable company multiples, are ineffective for New Economy companies." But don't be fooled, this book is more than just an obsolete relic of the bubble. Once you get past the sections devoted to high-tech start-ups, you'll find a thoughtful examination of technology's role in such critical 21st-century business mainstays as customer relationship management and supply-chain management. For this intelligent analysis, along with equally interesting chapters identifying technologies likely to spawn future revolutions, we from getAbstract recommend this book to managers in business development and technology.

TechVenture packs more insightful analysis into every chapter than any other book I've read recently. The chapters on Value and Wireless E-Business alone are worth the price of the book. It's good to see a realistic look toward profitability (at last!) and to have that realism temper a forward-looking work like this is a pleasure indeed. Bravo!

its a really good book, i bought it 'cause i loved the previous one ASP Unleashed a few years ago, this one its in the same line, so its also very good... It have good explanations(even some repeated ones from chapter to chapter, but thats ok), it explains very well with good examples, like a step-by-step, much better even than the TYS in 21 days. I start developing high level ASP.NET stuff with this book in 7 days, spending 2 hours per night in business days and 5 hours in each day of the weekend. I can say Im a high level ASP developer, so the people with less knowledge will probably spend no more than 3x than me.
It explains EVERYTHING u need to know to take the jump from ASP to ASP.NET, after this book the websites of .NET will be more than enough for your next higher steps.

Great book to learn how to create ASP.NET pages using VB.NET. I have bought Stephen Walther's classic ASP books a few years ago and staying true to his style he introduces you to new concepts and then shows several implementations of it. It's great to see not only an idea talked about and the properties/methods listed, but then see at least one example of how to do it (unlike O'Reilly books). I've been programming in classic ASP for over four years and switched to ASP.NET about 6 months ago and must say anyone on fence thinking about switching - I say do it!! ASP.NET is a hundred times more powerful and, while it may take a few months to get totally comfortable, I guarantee you'll be glad you invested the time in learning it. This book covered all the key concepts, allowing me to create several grade A online application using the .NET framework. I'm hoping the author comes out with a "next step" book like he did with the classic ASP series. While this book does cover lots of the advanced topics in the later chapters (caching, dynamic graphics, transactions), I know with the depth of the .NET framework (32,000 objects) there is more out there. I'd say if your a newbie to intermediate level this is the book for you. And even though I've moved on to C# for my ASP.NET programming, I still use this book as a reference to implement the .NET framework. The book is also great in that it doesn't relay on Visual Studio to teach you - actually I don't remember one VS example. Anyone can point and click in VS - this book shows you how to actually do it.

I believe I have purchased just about every book covering ASP .NET from Amazon since the inception of .NET.

That's a lot of books! Unfortunately, MOST turned out to be real duds or overly simplified - not much good for building real applications and ASP .NET sites. Too many authors were just trying to meet deadlines and produce one of the first books on the subject to hit the market - most are paper weights if anything.

This book is by far the best. Leaves the other reads in the dust. This book , however, is not for programmers just beginning .NET programming. It covers many real world applications of .NET and applies real world solutions. I've only owned the book for 4 days and it has already answered many of my lingering questions that the previous books did not cover.

Simply THE BEST ASP .NET book out there! I'm not a paid endorsement either. More so a frazzled programmer trying to learn the new platform quickly and apply to projects at my work place. I'm currently building a new LIMS application for the product test lab at my work place. The application is 100% ASP .NET.

Where the other books were a disappointment, this book's organization and content display the author's cohesive thought process. His pride in producing a quality book shows through!

I look forward to future releases from this author.

"In the end, the real distinction between digital winners and losers is always found in the boardroom" are saying to us Larry Downes and Chunka Mui in their book: Unleashing the Killer App. They think that too often senior managers still believe that technology is essentially a tool to implement strategy rather than the basis of forming it. These executives did not realize that technology became a disruptive force shaking their industrial strategies previously defined in a more stable business environment.

How this could happen? The authors explained in the first chapter that, in a new networked environment, joined Moore's law -every 18 months, processing power doubles while cost holds constant- and Metcalfe's law -the utility of a network equals the square of the number of its users- are dropping exponentially the transaction costs. As transaction costs discovered in the 30's by the economist Ronald Coase are defining the size of the organizations, we can easily understand the increase of mergers, downsizing and outsourcing to keep industrial firms competitive to face new appearing competitors using all the potential of the technology.

In the industrial age, sustainable competitive advantage required leverage over at least one of the Michael Porter's "Five Forces" customers, suppliers, competitors, new entrants, and substitutes. In the digital age, surrounding these five forces are three new forces: digitization, globalization, and deregulation giving harder time to achieve competitive advantage. The value chain is under extreme pressure and is asking to implement a new digital strategy. Such strategy must be constantly rethought and shared by the total organization. Strategy time frame is shrinking from three, five years to 18 months and well thought plans are replaced by moving projects and experiments to test new ideas.

In the second chapter the authors are asking us to design our own killer apps to avoid somebody else to do it. A killer app is a new good or service that establishes an entirely new category not in a scheme of an incremental change but in discontinuity and in big leaps.

Three categories of killer apps are proposed, each one including four killer apps from the external of the organization to networks and to the internal, from the customers to your partners and to your employees.

External -reshaping the landscape- asked to outsource to the customer to integrate the customer in your production process, to cannibalize your market before somebody else is doing it, to treat each customer as a market segment of one for personalization - customization, and to create communities of value for enlarging customer experience.

Networks -building new connections- asked to replace rude interfaces with learning interfaces to gain mutual trust, to ensure continuity for the customer not for yourself to transfer him the advantages of new technology applications, to give away as much information as you can to add value to your information assets, and to structure any transaction as a joint-venture to build long-term relationships.

Internal -redefining the interior- asked to treat your assets as liabilities to concentrate on your information assets; to destroy your value chain to make sure to stay competitive, to manage innovation as a portfolio of options to make sure to be at the forefront of technology, and to hire the children to keep freshness of mind.

In the third chapter the authors are giving us advises from their own experience to unleash the killer app.

To make sure that digital strategy will be implemented the creation of a digital strategy team is recommended with a total involvement of senior managers. A technology radar, a technology pipeline and technical partnerships are other ideas to introduce in the organization to create the necessary environment to surf on the wave of new technologies. Last message from the authors, just do it, means experiment your ideas and your killer app will be coming out.

This book is a real value for CEOs who want to compete in the cyberspace the new marketspace of our common future. Moving to the New Economy is not easy, but we have there, with this book a base to work on the transformation that need our industrial organizations.

The stirrup in the Medieval Ages, the Model T automobile in the Industrial Age, and PCs, electronic funds transfer, word processors and Web search engines in the Information Age are all examples of "killer apps" - new goods or services that establish entirely new categories and reshape existing power structures.

"Like the Hindu god Shiva, they are both regenerative and destructive," explain consultants Larry Downes and Chunka Mui in their highly compelling digital strategy manual, "Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance" (1998 Harvard Business School Press). The book is chock full of case studies of companies who are either riding the Internet wave to fortune and fame - or have been sidelined and marginalised.

The new forces of our age are globalisation, digitisation and deregulation. Traditional corporate strategies are getting replaced by digital strategies, which are more dynamic, intuitive, and participatory.

The Internet (along with its intra-organisational manifestation, the Intranet) has firmly occupied centre stage in the global marketspace thanks to three fundamental laws: Moore's law, Metcalfe's law, and Coase's law. Moore's law maintains that processing power doubles every 18 months while costs hold constant. According to Metcalfe's law, the utility of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.

And economist Ronald Coase observes that as markets become more efficient, there is an increasing organisational trend towards downsizing, outsourcing, and decentralisation ("The Law of Diminishing Firms"). Killer apps are now the result of these three principles operating together in cyberspace. To these three laws, the authors add one more: the Law of Disruption, accounting for the disruption caused by exponentially-changing technology on incrementally-changing social systems.

The Internet is taking every advantage of every new advance in communications, interface design, computer architecture and information sharing software via a combination of Moore's and Metcalfe's laws. The explosive growth of the multimedia Internet is redefining business-to-consumer and business-to-business services across the globe; for instance, it enables suppliers and distributors - and even prospective mates - to directly find one another across international borders, sidestepping many intermediaries.

"The Web is currently tearing apart the financial services and telecom industries, among others, inspiring civil wars there much as the steam engine did years ago," the authors explain.

Via killer apps, cutting edge companies in the Internet age are transforming their businesses from producers of commodity goods to providers of sophisticated services. Companies like Dell Computers, Cisco Systems, Federal Express, Charles Schwab and Amazon.com are successfully re-aligning relationships with and among consumers via Internet technologies and building unprecedented brand loyalty in cyberspace.

The Web is creating "shock waves in information components of every industry," so much so that digital technologies are not just enablers of change, but disrupters of current operating models.

Digital age strategies need not be the preserve only of IT companies - Nike, for instance, is progressively divorcing itself from production, distribution, advertising, and even design; most of these operations are being outsourced. "We decided we're a sports company, not just a shoe company," CEO Phil Knight has remarked. "What Nike has kept for itself is brand management, the relentless development of the Nike world view, the Nike lifestyle, and the Nike experience," the authors explain.

To be able to develop digital strategies, a company must improve its ability to spot, internalise, shape and exploit killer apps, the authors claim. Organisations have to be become more nimble, open, fun, and take on a new incarnation.

Traditional organisations need to focus on three key areas of change for digital strategy in the network age: re-shaping the organisational environment, building new connections with business partners and customers, and re-defining their core structure and strategy.

Re-shaping the business environment can take place via features like mass customisation, user empowerment, and online communities. For instance, Federal Express is reaping tens of millions of dollars of savings in customer service costs thanks to enhanced features on its Web site such as letting customers print their own airbills, complete with bar code.

Experimenting with digital strategies may even involve "cannibalisation" of one's own products and services, a fear shared by many print publications initially venturing online. The key, the authors claim, is to use the online channel as an entry point for higher-value services, such as searchable and customisable financial data feeds. Otherwise, a competitor may cannibalise your products. "Jumpstart new markets with the credibility and goodwill you already have," the authors urge.

Notable success stories in this regard include U.S. electronics parts distributor Marshall Industries, which seemingly cannibalised its own business by setting up a Web site which put its suppliers and buyers directly in touch with one another. But in effect, it created a new global channel - it now receives 2,000 inquiries a day from 52 countries via its Web site. Thus inspired, Marshall Industries is now getting into the Extranet services business for the electronics industry.

Examples of successful online personalisation services include PointCast, the Wall Street Journal's Personal Journal, Intuit's Quicken, and Hallmark Greeting Cards' online reminder service for special anniversaries.

"The closer you can get to activities about which the community feels passionate, the greater the potential value you can capture," the authors claim (much on the lines of John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong's earlier bestseller, "Net Gain"). Sites like PlumbNet and Barter Systems are tapping into "Do It Yourself" trends - the growing desire for people to take charge of activities themselves and save money.

Successful examples of virtual community building include online gaming, ESPN SportsZone's fantasy leagues, online dating services, and America Online's People Connection service and Buddy Lists. "Brand management in cyberspace requires real engagement with customers," the authors say. Customer service is being replaced by "customer intimacy."

Forming partnerships and building new organisational connections are key in the digital age. These can cover the full gamut from strategic alliances and joint ventures to equity stakes and outright ownership - well exemplified by Microsoft's buying out of WebTV, and its 25 percent stake in cable TV giant ComCast.

Managing innovation as portfolio management using risk analysis calls for new skills, leadership, and will, the authors explain. For instance, while it was in the era of first generation spreadsheets, Lotus spun off a separate company called Iris to develop the Notes product.

Another source of new ideas and fresh inspiration can come from hiring young people, and tapping into the skillsets and aptitudes of children (probably better addressed in other books like "Growing Up Digital" by Dan Tapscott).

Acquiring the killer app mindset requires a strong degree of technology alignment. "Organisations cannot unleash killer apps until they can harness their own business and technology expertise," the authors say.

For this, organisations need to invest in IT and skillset-building. This can be aided by fostering an e-mail culture and reliable tools for document sharing and collaboration. "It becomes impossible to determine where the business stops and the technology starts," the authors explain, citing examples like Amazon.com and Cisco.

Companies also need to constantly innovate. The online mall MCI Marketplace died a slow death because it became stale; cybermalls will need to continually add new features and create new shopping experiences on the Web.

"The organisation with the healthiest environment for identifying, nurturing and redefining killer apps, whether their own or those invented by others (perhaps for entirely different purposes), is the organisation that will translate its digital strategy into market dominance," the authors conclude.

In sum, this is a conceptually breathtaking overview of the context within which the Web paradigm is changing business the way we know it. An online companion and an online discussion group would have helped extend the shelf-life of this book.

I've just re-read this book and think more highly of it now than I did previously. Larry Downes & Chunka Mui define a "killer application" as "a new good or service that establishes an entirely new category and, by being first, dominates it, returning several hundred percent on the initial investment." As they explain, the primary forces at work in spawning today's "killer apps" are both technological and economic in nature. "The technology we are concerned with is the transformation of information into digital form, where it can be manipulated by computers and transmitted by networks." Digital strategies are needed to achieve market dominance.

The co-authors divide their book into three parts: Digital Strategy, Designing the Killer App, and Unleashing the Killer App. In Part I, there is a brief discussion of one "killer app" in the Middle Ages, the stirrup, which added mounted cavalry to the battle equation. The "lowly stirrup" played a singular role in rearranging the political, social, and economic structure of medieval Europe.

In The Lever of Riches, Joel Mokyr identifies countless other "killer apps" throughout history such as paved streets and sewerage disposal; the lever, wedge, and screw; the heavy plow and three-field system; the weight-driven mechanical clock; spectacles; the printing press; the steam engine; the telegraph; the bicycle; ...each of which also had a truly profound impact.

To repeat, Larry Downes & Chunka Mui concern themselves with the technology of transforming information into digital form. Thus in Part I, they examine the "killer app", explain what they call "the new economics", and then shift their attention to the nature of a digital strategy. They dully acknowledge the disruptive power of "killer apps" which can suddenly destroy the equilibrium of what appeared to be stable systems of commerce and government. For them, business change now originates with digital technology; more specifically, with "killer apps." Strategies are needed to manage (to the extent possible) their impact to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. These strategies must accommodate three new forces: digitization, globalization, and deregulation. The "dirty little secret" to which Gary Hamel has referred is that the strategy industry "doesn't have any theory of strategy creation." The success of any digital strategy may well be the result of what Hamel calls "lucky foresight." Downes & Mui seem to agree with Hamel while offering, in Part II, what they refer to as "a few rules of thumb." They suggest three stages of "killer app" design and carefully explain each. They identify 12 specific principles on which to base the design process. In Part III, they shift their attention to "Unleashing the Killer App" and correctly stress the importance of communication, one which "speaks with the language of ideas, scenarios, options, and what-ifs."

In Chapter 7, the reader's attention is directed to two major corporations, McDonald's and VEBA AG, which illustrate digital strategy in practice. These are, in effect, mini-case studies. It is important to point out, however, that effective digital strategies are not the sole province of major corporations such as these. A "killer app" can quickly increase or reduce the size of any company. Consider the fact that a single dry goods store in Kemmerer (Wyoming) can become the J.C. Penney Company which, in turn, now struggles (with mixed results) to compete successfully with a company whose own history can be traced back to the Walton 5&10 in Bentonville (Arkansas). Downes & Mui assert that "Developing digital strategy...requires components of both problem-pull and technology-push...operating together in a well-functioning organization [in which] the process becomes not only circular but indistinguishable...in a pragmatic, indeed opportunistic, response to the new digital environment."

In the final chapter of their brilliant analysis, Downes & Mui suggest that cyberspace "is fueled by free computing power and free bandwidth...and free software." Consequently, "the social conditions that resulted are raw, and the nature of the business climate, by necessity, less developed." As with The Golden Rule dry goods store (in 1902) and then the Walton 5&10 (in 1950), today's companies must seek out new areas of opportunity and start doing business there. "Those who make the transformation by developing a digital strategy are choosing to engage the frontier on its own terms, just as their counterparts from Europe did in settling the New World."

Larry Downes & Chunka Mui have outlined the process of digital strategy, explained the twelve design principles, and described the experiences of organizations that are transforming themselves so that they can unleash "killer apps." Which companies will conquer the "frontier", whatever and wherever it may be? Which companies will not? In the Digital Marketplace, we won't have to wait very long for the answers. Probably in what seems to be about five minutes. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

I've been a Patricia Seybold fan for awhile, and I so anxiously awaited this book that I bought it from the first place that had it in stock.

I was a bit disappointed. Maybe it's just me, and I actually know a lot more about e-commerce than I thought, but I didn't get any real insights from the book. The strategies seemed more like platitudes I'd heard over and over before, and the framework for implementation was vague enough that it would take an experienced consultant to flesh it out to the point of usefulness.

But perhaps that is the point. One can't expect everything from a book, and there are some things this book does exceptionally well. The case studies alone are well worth the purchase price, and Patricia's Rx (a section discussing each case study) offers some good ideas for implementation.

I wavered between three and four stars for this book, and went with stars because I think a lot of my disappointment was due to too high expectations. I would recommend this book as part of an e-business "trinity" along with Larry Downes & Chuka Mui's excellent "Unleashing the Killer App" and Winston, Stahl & Choi's "Economics of Electronic Commerce." Economics of E-commerce gives the background, Killer App the theory, and customers.com gives the examples that lead to understanding.

All in all, an worthwhile read.

CUSTOMERS.COM is a very valuable book in that it focuses both on how to serve customers on-line as well as how to make money doing so.

Like a good consultant, the author systematically looks at best practices from each of 16 cases, and combines the lessons into a vision of the future best practice (in 2-3 years) that no one is yet doing. This is an outstanding accomplishment, that is not matched in most best practice books.

I also visited the CUSTOMERS.COM Web site to register for the free booklet that is offered, and was pleased to get many ideas to improve our own electronic commerce. Be sure to check here from time to time, because the author updates the 16 case histories in the book on the Web site so that you can keep up-to-date. That is an especially nice touch.

Ms. Seybold does a nice job in CUSTOMERS.COM of critiquing each case history for ways that organization could improve. Let me do the same for her book. Several things stand out. First, the book does not go into enough detail about how to find the weaknesses in current operations that will permit greater profitability through changed processes facilitated by electronic commerce. There is a lot of best practice work needed in those areas before you start thinking about electronic commerce. Second, she does not address the question of what the ideal best practice of electronic commerce is. You might think of a well-informed concierge in a great hotel who knows you well as the model for this ideal best practice. Third, more needs to be done to help you learn how to facilitate the change process. The steps she describes would be very difficult for many organizations to implement that are beset by severe stalls in the form of tradition, disbelief, misconceptions, bureaucracy, avoiding the unattractive (such as customer problems), procrastination, and miscommunication. Fourth, the book highlights a lot of very interesting case histories and shows their successes. I was struck that although I am a heavy Web user and a substantial customer of many of these organizations, I did not know about the electronic services they offer. It sounds like many of these organizations still have a communications problem with their customers. Fifth, the available technology will advance a lot in the next five years. I felt the book does not do enought to make people aware of how technology that is not yet available can facilitate the future success of their electronic commerce.

No book can serve all needs in an area, so we can look forward to Ms. Seybold's next book. I enjoyed the personal touch as she described her own experiences with many of the companies involved. I hope she keeps in touch with them and us. I suspect she will based on the e-mails I get from her after registering on her site.

This book has many good and bad reviews. It seems that you either like it or hate it. I believe that it all has to do with the expectations of the reader.

Customers.com is about the concept and relationships between E-commerce, business objectives, internal business procedures and customer/supplier relationship (all together: E-Business). I believe that Mrs. Seybold is doing an excellent job in analyzing implemented concepts, and explaining why they are important. The case studies are great examples for many executives who don't understand the technology, but like to focus on the business side of E-Commerce and E-Business. (Unlike the university teacher from LA, I believe that E-Commerce and E-Business are not the same.) This book will give the executive food for thought, and a starting point for discussing E-Business with their own staff and technical consultants.

It is also important to notice that this book is written in 1998. Around that time, hit counts were all that mattered, and the more visitors your site had, the better you were doing. Mrs. Seybold passed all that in her book, and focused on CRM, something that wasn't important then, but is huge right now. In 2000, everyone is talking about CRM, and it is a sin if you ignore it. Mrs. Seybold was ahead of her times, which proves her reputation.Customers.com is an excellent read, especially in 2000!

Don't read this book if you expect a manual on how to start your own E-Business. This book will not give you information on how to implement all the necessary technology; if you are just focused on the implemented Information Technology this book is not for you. The implemented technology is given to you in a quick 1 or 2 page(s) breakdown per case study. Customers.com will not tell you how to set up a Data Warehouse, or start Data Mining, however it will explain you how important it is and how the results of such are implemented.

A book that will discuss everything involved, in detail, has to have thousands of pages and does not exist.

Kalakota's book provides a crisp, high-level overview of the e-business landscape. This book is written to the CEO and other executives. It is not designed for the technical specialist as it provides little detail on how to set up certain systems/platforms. What is does offer is an overarching panorama of the important areas to be aware of in migrating to an e-business framework. These include, e-procurement, supply chain management, selling chain management, CRM, ERP, and other functional and/or enterprise-wide applications. Each chapter is brimming with terms, acronyms, charts, and information. It would be hard to assimilate all this material in a one-day read for example. I would take each chapter in small bites.

One of the things I liked about the book was all the good questions scattered throughout. These are the types of questions every company needs to be asking and wrestling with. They are fundamental strategy questions with an e-business bent. For example, if you don't know how to define the interrelationships in your supply chain, or how your infrastructure can allow the creation of new value propositions, then you might want to start asking these questions. It is quite apparent, as illustrated in this book and others, that there is too much money to be saved, too many markets to penetrate, and too many methods of leveraging competencies, to not be taken by an e-business model that makes information transparent, inventory visible, and collaboration the status quo.

Kalakota ends the book with some strategies for implementing an e-business blueprint. Similar to most major projects, issues of scope, scale, politics, etc. come into play. The last two chapters provide a relatively good consolidation and closure of the material. Overall, I think this a valuable book for the executive and manager to have on their bookshelf.

In world of fads, acronyms and new buzz-words, IT managers don't have the time to dig through the hype to figure out what is real and what isn't. As a result, they are often confused (sometimes intentionally by vendors/consultants). Confusion is a serious problem when you are making multi-million dollar investment decisions that can either make or break your enterprise.

e-Business is not about throwing up a good looking website. e-Business is about architecting a mission-critical back-office to support the end-to-end transactions and providing an integrated customer experience. Creating a 24x7 integrated back-office isn't easy. Most e-business projects fail here.

This book helped me get a clearer picture of the issues that I am dealing with every day as a CIO. The book systematically builds the e-business investment landscape and then delves into each major application framework. This book is certainly something every e-biz implementation person should read.

Most e-business books don't get into the IT implementation side. They often gloss over the details and difficulties associated with what it takes to get it done. E-Business is not all about strategies and business models, it is about implementation and careful execution - one project at a time. This is more true in Fortune 2000 companies, which are just coming off large ERP implementations. They are all worried about how to leverage the ERP investment. The new-age gurus and consultants are telling them to junk everything in the race to e-business. This advice may work for some but for most it will lead to disaster.

This book really asks and answers fundamental questions, how do you systematically invest in building an integrated e-business infrastructure. What pieces do you invest in and how do you sequence your decisions when each framework (CRM, supply-chain etc.) take 3 years to implement. The key point that I got out of this book is that e-business is a journey that requires tremendous commitment especially in a large firm. Managers who are after e-business better understand what it takes to build rock-solid applications.

If you're looking for a potted history of marketing or an essay about how the Internet is coming of age, please don't think you'll get the answers in this book. However, if you're in business now or thinking of starting up perhaps you should read this. Don't expect a ten-point plan on how to gain market superiority via the Internet or instructions on how to put your customers in a loyalty box they won't be able to escape from, but it may just help if you want to still *be* in business in the next few years.

As a senior manager of IT & statistical services in the public sector for over ten years I find that Locke et al make me ashamed for all the times I didn't tell suppliers that I would no longer accept their crap. I hope some of those suppliers are reading this book and taking heed because I'm sharing my copy with my colleagues and together we represent a not-too-shabby purchasing power...

I hope the message is clear; get a clue!

Outside, and inside my "day job," I have spent the last three years immersed in cyberspace conversations. The Cluetrain Manifesto accurately reflects the feel of this medium as much as any book could. It reads like a long and intense rap session, and it hits reality again and again in a way that corporate America so far fails to by and large. Trust me, you haven't read a book like this. If you feel as though you do not yet understand cyberspace, this book will immerse you in the culture in an easy to understand yet frequently irreverent way.

The topic of this book comes down primarily to people, conversation, and culture. Not business, and not technology. The common misperception that business and technology form the driving force behind the Internet, reflects a common misperception still very prevalent in society at large. It reflects a misperception that will cost companies billions and billions of dollars if they continue to believe it. Indeed it probably already has.

In a turn of events that will send shudders of terror through corporate America, most of the business-as-usual ways of thinking, acting, and talking, of the last century prove absolutely toxic to the would-be successful corporation doing business in this new medium. In yet another turn that will provide some comfort, most of what you know about life outside your current "day job" will prove more useful than anything you ever could have learned in obtaining a marketing degree. If you hate your job, but you love the rest of your life, you may find yourself far ahead of those overachieving "team players" who love business as usual. Cyberspace changes the rules, and the Cluetrain Manifesto shows us how.

The payoff in understanding this, will prove handsome. Corporate manager types who wonder how to turn their employees "wasted time" on the Internet into money and "market share" now have their answer. The answer, however, means that they must accept that they will never really have control over their employees again. Of course the easiest way to accept this is to realize that they never did.

Many people happen to think this is a great book and I think it's definitely something that many business majors could benefit from. I'd advise people who don't find this book to be of any use or to be "nothing more than the ramblings of a number of self-appointed dot-com smart guys who have little or no experience in the real world of profit and loss" to stick to lower level reading and I think I'm not alone here judging by the other reviewers. "How-to's" are probably what you should be grazing on, spiteful remarks notwithstanding. As all successful businessmen know, and there are still many on the Web, it takes creative thinking to implement vision in real-world manifestations and this book is a great starting place for spurring that kind of thinking -- the now-cliched "Thinking out of the box." Anybody would rather devote several years of their lives to a project that's original enough to succeed and taking the thoughts in this book to heart is a great way to help assure that.

In high risk information based businesses people use names and reputations to make decisions. Fashion and Movies are two examples where the name "Aramani" or "Julia Roberts" will make a product or company a success.

In the "New New Thing" Lewis shows that this process has happened in the buying and selling of High Tech companies (if not their products) and he shows how Jim Clark got rich based upon his reputation.

The book gives a good and fairly candid view of Clark. I felt that Lewis kept his distance from the subject and avoided being swept up in the hype of Clark driven companys. Lewis's writing is fresh and enjoyable. The stories about how High Tech companies get started and how VC's and engineers work together to create companies were interesting and informative.

Lewis focuses entirely on Clark, so it is difficult to tell if Clark's ability to make money based on his name is limited to him, or if there are others who are achieving the Rock Star status he has.

Overall well worth reading.

Michael Lewis is a fine writer and this is a superb book. In a style that I find reminiscent of Tom Wolfe, Lewis brings the contemporary Silicone Valley ethos alive much the way he did 80's Wall Street in Liar's Poker. Wolfe did the same for the 1960's counterculture in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and the take-it-to-the-edge world of military test-pilots and the pioneer astronauts in The Right Stuff. Both writers utilize exuberant portraits of their protagonists as literary mechanisms for telling bigger stories. In the New New Thing, the phenomenon that Lewis leads us into is the explosive convergence between radical technology and Wall Street that has in recent years brought about the fastest creation of paper wealth that history has ever seen. The individual that he zeroes in on to reveal the magic of this story is Jim Clark, who is probably best-known as the creator of Netscape. As a poor-boy engineer who rocketed overnight onto the Forbes 400 list of the world's wealthiest people, Clark is, to start with, a good representative of the class of new age techno-entrepreneurs. But as Lewis's vehicle to the bigger story, Clark is magnified into the very embodiment of the spirit animating today's "new economy". This entertaining, often hilarious, 268 pages makes it much clearer what's happening there than volumes of ponderous analysis by conventional commentators. If you can somehow imagine Abbie Hoffman as a brilliant and over-achieving engineer, you'll have some sense of the picture of Clark that emerges from this book. A born revolutionary with a prankster's attitude towards the established order, Clark is nonetheless deadly serious about technology and it's practical applications. Add to this a ruthless self-confidence and a pied-piper-like hold over investors and a coterie of talented, workaholic programmers, and it's possible to see how - just as one small example of new-economy magic - Clark was able to enrich his loyal followers and add half billion or so to his own net worth in a few days via a public offering of one of his companies that had neither earnings, a product, nor even much of business plan to speak off. Cashing in on vision, charisma, and hope, Clark has given the world a lesson in modern techno-economics, the wild and weird essence of which Mr. Lewis lays bare for us in this excellent study.

Over 10 years ago I read Liars Poker, also by the author Michael Lewis, and was captivated by the investment world. As Lewis illustrates, the power has shifted from Wall Street to Silicon Valley in the 90s and Michael provides access to one of the Valley's founding fathers, Jim Clark.

Lewis walks us through the stories behind the three companies Clark helps create, and provides insight into Clark's current project, myCFO.com. One ironic aspect of the book is the fact that one of Clark's companies rushed it's public offering so Clark could pay for his $70 million sail boat.

I found this book to be one of the special reads that I couldn't put down.