Place to Space

by Peter Weill, Michael Vitale

Place to Space is the essential e-business playbook that will give leaders the insight and confidence they need to operate successfully in both place and space. The book explains how traditional companies can adapt their bricks-and-mortar legacies to complement and bolster their online ventures. Based on extensive research into dozens of e-business initiatives, this book provides the first systematic, practical analysis of eight viable e-business models; an adaptable hybrid model for competing against online pure plays; and revolutionary schematic tools for analyzing current business models and evaluating promising new web initiatives. Through illuminating case studies of Lonely Planet, General Electric, CDNow, Reuters, and others, the authors show how each model works in practice--from how it makes money to the core competencies and critical factors required to implement it.

Genres: Business

372 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2001

Reviews

[Marks54 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of the very large number of books out at around this time seeking to explain the Internet and the e-business models that were being built upon it. It is written as a trade book, so the writing is stodgy and repetitive and presentation appears too packaged. Still, it is useful and informative in how it generates different business models. By "business model" is meant a specific statement of what activities are provided by a given business, in what sequence, and how the money flows (or doesn't flow) back to the firm based on these activities. This is a basic level of logic well below that of a "strategy" but it is useful when considering these strange businesses for which people at the time were willing to invest vast sums. Overall, the book is more useful than entertaining, especially in cutting through the buzzwords that are so common in HBS publications. Readers should also not that by the time this volume was published, the Internet boom/bubble was already bursting and some of these firms were already being liquidated.