What we are seeing with electronic commerce is a meltdown of traditional business boundaries, which is turning our well-established value chains into outdated economic fetters. Electronic commerce, with its notions of disintermediation, electronic communities of interest and virtual companies, is challenging our most basic assumptions about business. Clear lines between structure and process, owning and using, knowing and learning, real and virtual, are disappearing. In electronic commerce, business power doesn't flow neatly up and down the value chain, but is flattened out across a vibrant global web of connectivity. Electronic commerce is turning into a new form of empowerment electrifying everything and everyone it touches in business.
Buyers sell and sellers buy.
A customer is a competitor and a competitor is a customer. On every front, opposites are blurring. It is, indeed, an exhilarating moment in the history of global commerce. Electronic commerce is much more than online transactions. In this new network economy the old laws are being torn apart.