Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs
God forbid that doing business and making money on the  Internet should bear any resemblance whatsoever to the past millennium  of bricks-and-mortar capitalism--that would be too easy.  Nope, it's a  whole different ball game now, and the new rule is: adapt or die.  At  least that's the message behindDigital Capital.  From the  three principal cyberconsultants at the Alliance for Converging  Technologies (one of whom, Don Tapscott, authored the bestsellersThe Digital  EconomyandGrowing Up Digital),  comes a paradigm for global takeover: the business web, or "b-web" for  short. In their words, b-webs are "strategically aligned,  multi-enterprise partner networks of producers, suppliers, service  providers, infrastructure companies, and customers that conduct  business communication and transactions via digital channels."  Some  examples are eBay, Cisco, Dell, MP3.com... in short, any enterprise  that a) knows how to form lateral partnerships with other  goods-or-service providers, and b) eliminates the role of planes,  trains, and automobiles--not to mention lots of time, money, and human  energy--by doing almost everything over the Internet. Not only do the  authors provide a wealth of b-web case studies (including Charles  Schwab, Priceline.com, Webvan, AT&T; Solutions, and OptiMark in  addition to those mentioned above), they outline a step by-step  process for weaving a b-web of one's own.Too often,Digital  Capital's sound ideas come marinated in think-tank jargon so  alienated from plain English as to be nearly impenetrable. Consider:  "Disaggregation leads to 'disintermediation' and 'reintermediation',"  which, believe it or not, isn't a line that French film theorists use  in pick-up bars, but the simple statement that business webs manage to  cut out a lot of the traditional steps between producers and  customers. Now why couldn't they just have said that?  No  matter. After you nibble through the self-important MBA-speak, you'll  find a smart look at how online shops are rewiring early 21st-century  capitalism. --Timothy Murphy