A lot about e-commerce was still unknown, and a lot of mistakes were still to be made. But the authors took up the challenge of telling business how to adapt to the Internet, so we re going to hold them to it. Give Hagel and Armstrong credit. They hit on the idea of community, which is one of the key ways business on the Internet is different from offline business. There are now more than 12 million registered eBay users, buying and selling millions of items.
More buyers bring more sellers, which bring more buyers, etc.
At times, the authors exaggerate the importance of community. Sure, it has chat rooms, buddy lists, and the like. But most people use Yahoo because it is easy to navigate, reliable, loads quickly, and is useful. Net Gain comes up short on concrete examples of online communities that work, but then there weren t many at the time. The book touches only briefly on some of the electronic exchanges emerging on the Internet at the time and doesn t predict the important effects that these exchanges are having on how businesses buy from and sell to each other.