Best In Brief
B2B and the dotcom crash
George S. Day, Adam J. Fein and Gregg Ruppersberger
Douglas WestUniversity of Westminster
Fifteen years ago there were just over 830 PC manufacturers; now there are arguably 8 to 10 viable survivors. Just about every internet market faces the same statistics, but the abruptness of the shakeout in the dotcom boom took many people by surprise.
One of the most hotly contested dotcom areas was online business-to-business exchanges, with nearly 300 formed in 1999 and over 1500 at the peak in 2000. Most entrants were pure-play operators such as...