Notes:
Lets take a step back and review some aspects of first generation web businesses.E-mail made the web popular. Soon there were buzzwords like e-business and e-commerce and people had e-nough of it all. Then, the idea of selling cheaper by eliminating middlemen brought many businesses to the web. A typical supply chain consists of supplier, manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer and consumer. By setting up a shop on the web, a manufacturer could, in theory, eliminate wholesalers and retailers and gain direct access to consumers. This type of disintermediation has actually worked well for airline tickets, books, music and software. In practice, the manufacturer typically relies
on a B2C e-tailer like amazon.com or indiatimes air ticket auctions to reach the buyer.
In terms of technology, HTTP and HTML were of-course the most visible enablers. Actually there is a third unsung enabler any guesses? Its the universal resource identifier. Ok, how did the first generation of web businesses do their marketing? They simply bought lots of media space and tried to grab our attention. In fact, it was commonly accepted that you needed to have loss-making plans for the first year because of high marketing overheads. Eventually, the bubble burst and there was a period of consolidation where natural selection let the fittest ones survive.