2 comments about The Global Internet Economy.

1. This is an excellent history of the Internet Economy and as such highly recommended. Without no doubt one of the best history books available.

   The book is somewhat difficult to evaluate because the topics covered are so broad. The book describes how things did happen. But it does not try to predict or construct the future. It must be compared to Moschella's Customer Driven IT which identifies the challenges of the innovation system and draws a different scenario.

   The deregulation and disintegration of the hierarchical telecommunications industry to free market based structure is described in this book as in some others. When the e-commerce did not catch up to the degree originally expected, Internet is paradoxically heralded as a remarkable social success, with rapid global penetration, but largely a business failure (Kogut, page 438). But this claim - like a typical market research - focuses on revenue generation and reintermediation, and does not recognize the intermediate form between hierarchy and market, the networked process and related disintermediation. In The Global Internet Economy, this comes as some kind of an afterthought:

   "A primary effect of the Internet has been to render the back-office operations, such as customer service, more efficiently. These activities were not captured in the definitions of B2B and B2C but may in fact constitute the bulk of the explanation for the increase in productivity observed in the 1990s" (Kogut, page 443).

   From consumer perspective, Internet may substitute or streamline many key everyday processes, such as going to library, or to look at prices in the shops, or buying tickets or paying bills. It is this convenience value is undervalued in Internet productivity statistics (Kogut, page 459).

   This is the third phase in the formation process of an industry. In the first, pre-commercial and early commercial phases government and universities played vital roles. In the second phase, venture capital (with the ease of exit provided by new technology-oriented stock exchanges) was the midwife for creation of the industry, and in the third phase large firms were able to integrate the techniques into their technological toolkit (Kenney, pages 69-70).

   "The U.S. institution of venture capital played a central role in the rapid formation of new dedicated Internet firms that were established to define and occupy the new economic space" (Kenney, page 70). Almost 90 % of venture capital in the latter half of the 1990s vent to Internet-related companies (Kogut, page 446).

   As a summary, this book is about history. Now when we are in that "third phase" we need scenarios and roadmaps for the future, but the book does not try to synthesize these.




2. Bruce Kogut did a fine job as an editor. However, the linkage between the chapters is not there. This book gives in-depth view of the seven countries: France, Germany, India, Japan, S. Korea, Sweden, USA, on their IT infrastructure, success and failure stories. It is difficult to find a good text for a college course "Global E Commerce" that I developed. This book is about as good as I can get. Most E-commerce books use American Ebay and Amazon as the only success models, never discussed anything else. The students seemed to like the book after I added Global E-Commerce materials, such as 56 in-land Europe discount airlines, 25 countries in the European Union since May 1, 2004. This is the result of my own research by traveling to 55 foreign coutries outside of USA. The book will be much better if CASE studies are included in wanadoo.com, nttdocomo.com, Neuer market.... Ireland and UK are not included, turned out to be a major drawback in this book.

No comments about Microcomputer Marketplace 1993.

No comments about QUEST'S SQL NAVIGATOR SUPPORTS ORACLE 9I AND JAVA.: An article from: Worldwide Databases.

No comments about Introduction to Oracle 9i: SQL.

No comments about Information Industry Directory (Information Industry Directory Supplement).

No comments about CramSession's Oracle 8.0 SQL-PL/SQL : Certification Study Guide.

No comments about Oracle 10g Developing Media Rich Applications.

No comments about Oracle 7: A User's and Developer's Guide Including Release 7.1.

2 comments about Programming Oracle Triggers and Stored Procedures (3rd Edition) (Prentice Hall PTR Oracle Series).

1. This is an excellent beginner's book for programmers. It begins with an emphasises on the basics of creating tables with declarative constraints. Following this is an easy-to-understand graphical and written description of how to use database triggers to enhance the integrity of the database; then several chapters on PL/SQL. What I liked most about this book is the plain and simple approach to some complex topics. I would recommed this book to any technical person who wants to learn Oracle quickly. I almost didn't buy it because the key word "PL/SQL" is not in the title but it certainly provides nice coverage of PL/SQL, not just the language syntax but an intuitive meaning of the package specification and body.



2. This book provides an excellent starting place for the beginning programmer or DBA. There is a ton of information on relational databases & how they relate to Oracle. If you haven't been using Oracle for long then this is an excellent book to have! If you are already experienced in Oracle and looking for a reference book - or an advanced book - this isn't it.

No comments about CramSession's Oracle 7.3 Performance Tuning : Certification Study Guide.