Al Gore s Internet didn t count his votes in Florida, so there s no way the Internet is going to unsnarl traffic, speed up a ship, or cause excess inventory to magically disappear. The point is that the Internet enables collaborative processes and that logistics is a global collaborative process. Simple buying and selling is not collaborative. So, a dot-com that offers an online model for simple buying and selling is not going to be much better than what is in use today, and maybe it ll be worse. Those dot-coms will merge, change stripes or otherwise fail.
Collaborative processes are complicated.
Consider how production schedules get created, how they are driven by sales forecasts, and how they are linked into a logistics supply chain. Companies employ competent professionals to manage these processes precisely because they are complicated. But for the Internet to help, the software has to be thoughtful, based on an appreciation of business problems and their complexity, and valuable to the entire group of users. Now that the shake out has started, we can predict the winners and the losers. The winners will be those who deliver value to the industry as a member of it, not an interloper to it.