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  The Almighty and All-Important Consumer February 8, 1999 | |||||||||||||||
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By Brian Walsh Given the necessities of a magazine production schedule, I typically write my column a few weeks before its publication. This lead time has its constraints, the worst of which is that it's risky to make bold predictions; with the pace of change these days, new developments affecting my pronouncements may well occur between the time the column goes to press and the time you read it. This is especially true with a discussion of ever-fluid areas such as Internet stocks. However, in the spirit of living without a safety net, I'm going to take a stab at such future gazing, because the movement of serious money into Internet stocks has big implications for enterprise sites.
Wake-Up Call But late November and early December of last year saw movement in the stock market that flew in the face of the conventional approach. And now Wall Street has made two basic proclamations: The consumer is king; and it's not about products, but all about service. Let this serve as a wake-up call for those of us in the corporate enterprise. Any company that feels comfortable defining its site as a pure business-to-business site, a site where the only users are its trading partners' employees, should re-examine its approach. Now is the time for your site designers to plan a consumer facet for your business-to-business sites. Vive La Difference Business-to-consumer sites are in large part defined by their interaction with and knowledge about the consumer. How will the consumer register? What competitive sites does he or she frequent? What is the moment of value for both the site and the consumer? And finally, how will the site adapt to attract and retain yet more consumers? The business-to-consumer site's back end is largely undefined--any system, either ad hoc or strategically planned, will suffice as long as the consumer is secure and well-served. Business-to-consumer sites, at least in the popular conception on Wall Street, are manned by entrepreneurs who are boldly stealing market share from stodgy old brick-and-mortar companies. Business-to-business sites are inversely defined. In large part, a business-to-business site is defined by how well it connects to partners, rather than how it captures mindshare. Business-to-business site users are largely the same as a company's client/server or mainframe application users, with perhaps one minor difference: The business-to-business site user works for another company. Users are still considered captives who have no choice as to where or when they will exercise the application. Both the back end and the interfaces to the enterprise's legacy applications or to trading-partner networks are strictly defined.
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Until now, the conventional wisdom regarding e-commerce has pointed solidly at business-to-business sites as the market with the largest potential for growth. The rationale has been the enterprise's ability to spend money and consumer sites' inability to return profits any time soon. Accordingly, Internet infrastructure vendors (makers of communications equipment, servers and software) have concentrated their efforts on enabling e-commerce between traditional suppliers and customers. Within the enterprise, marketing and information services have focused on supporting and enhancing existing business-to-business relationships, and increasing volume and margin on existing products with new e-commerce technologies.
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