E-business no longer exists - all business is e-business

Résumé ou Introduction

The emergence of the Internet and the development of complex e-business applications have affected and fundamentally changed the way people conduct business worldwide across all industries. The Internet’s integration into companies’ strategies and the development of sophisticated e-business solutions caused transaction costs to decline, helped to shrink time and information asymmetry1, endowed firms with a new distribution channel and finally established new business ventures such as eBay.com, amazon.com, or google.com (Tucci & Afuah 2003). In addition to that, the Internet and e-business have enabled companies to participate in the worldwide market place, reduced inventory levels, and to benefit from the digitisation of products and services (Tassabehji 2003). Therefore, nowadays the long-term survival of firms depends no longer only on competitive advantages such as economies of scale, but especially on the intuition of adjusting correctly to a continuously changing competitive environment based upon the Internet’s options and e-business. This essay attempts to give an introduction to e-business and illustrates how ebusiness influences firm’s business models. It critically evaluates the statement “E-business no longer exists – all business is e-business” and tries to show the implications of this statement for business and management in general. [...]