Just as the Internet and the World Wide Web led to a huge change in how people interact with distant applications, so the Internet and Web services hold out the promise of drastically changing how distant applications interact with each other. But how real is this promise? If information systems could... [read more...]

The brutal competitive cycle of “creative destruction”, once limited to relatively few industries, is becoming tougher even as it becomes harder to escape. In studying competition in all US industries, McAfee and Brynjolfsson found that the entire economy has become “Schumpeterian” since the mid-1990s... [read more...]

This special report on the future of the Web includes articles on the security of the Internet and issues in Internet retailing, in addition to this interview with MIT Sloan’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Harvard’s Andrew McAfee. The two researchers explore what lies ahead as companies rush headlong into the... [read more...]

The advent of the information age has ushered in a slew of new technologies and the widened field of choice that comes with them. Managers find it hard to figure out what all those innovations do, let alone which ones to adopt and how to implement them. These advancements are technical in nature but... [read more...]

The variety of communication media that knowledge workers already have available to help them can be categorized as channels and platforms. Channels such as e-mail and instant messaging allow anyone to create and distribute information but carry information that is visible to a strictly limited number... [read more...]

Between 2000 and 2002, companies may have thrown away $130 billion of the information technology they had bought in the previous few years. Businesses overspent on IT out of fear that they would fall behind the performance of competitors who moved faster to adopt CRM, ERP, SCM, APS, and all the other... [read more...]

You face the task of implementing a complex but promising process-enabling IT system. You’ve read dozens of articles dissecting the many failures in such endeavors, but so did those who failed before you. Do you really have any reason to think you can do better? Andrew McAfee provides the usual comforting... [read more...]

Magic pixie dust. The froth on top of the New Economy bubble was made of it and a main ingredient of that magic pixie dust was “network effects” mixed with Metcalfe’s Law. These led to the usually fatal strategy of “getting big fast” to take advantage of Metcalfe’s dictum that the value of a network... [read more...]

In this excerpt from his book, HBS professor Andrew McAfee discusses how the Internet increased manufacturing productivity, lowered costs, and enabled businesses to form mutually beneficial alliances. In looking at alliances, McAfee notes the differences between point-to-point links, multi-partner integration... [read more...]

A short article on the future of peer-to-peer B2B commerce. Existing B2B models implicitly rest on client/server technologies. The advent of peer-peer technologies such as those employed by Napster and Gnutella promise to enable new B2B models. Rather than centralized exchanges, peer-to-peer networks... [read more...]