Amazon.com
In Digital Darwinism, Schwartz identifies seven strategies that will separate the winners from the losers. These include building a brand that stands for solving something, elastic pricing, affiliate partnerships, and integrating digital commerce with every aspect of business. Schwartz buttresses his arguments with analysis of dozens of companies already competing on the Internet, including Yahoo!, Peapod, Priceline, E*Trade, Dell Computer, and Recreational Equipment, Inc. Schwartz views these early years of the Web as largely "irrational," but anticipates a general rationalization. He writes, "As each successive generation of Web commerce passes, there will be more rational companies and fewer irrational ones, more fit business models and fewer unfit ones. In the future, there may be no such thing as an Internet company. The Internet is becoming so important that all companies will eventually become Internet companies."
Like his previous book, Webonomics, Digital Darwinism is succinct and easy to read. His analysis of the current state of Internet startups, their stock prices, and their probable fate is provocative, especially when viewed from a Darwinian perspective. For managers, investors, and anyone interested in Internet commerce. Recommended. --Harry C. Edwards
Industry Standard
In the opening paragraph of Digital Darwinism, Schwartz erroneously attributes to Darwin the ideas that organisms must "learn with whom to cooperate and with whom to compete" and must "develop new skills and traits or perish." The problem with the first assertion is that the traits on which Darwin focused are inherited, not learned.
As for the second, sharks have developed no new skills in 400 million years. Nor have they needed any. They evolved a good way to eat, and since then have had the field pretty much to themselves. No other fish has tried to copy the shark in order to put out a more efficient version.
In the business world, of course, copying others can be essential. One could argue that
Fortunately for the reader, Schwartz confines his Darwinian musings almost entirely to the introduction and epilogue. It's also fortunate that he knows much more about the Internet than he does about natural selection.
He illustrates an examination of dynamic pricing, for example, with well-chosen anecdotes about Band-X, a market for data-network capacity; Priceline.com, which offers customers a way to pick up leftover airline seats; and
Schwartz has spoken with the right people, and his clear prose navigates well the complex conditions of the Web. As he details the concepts to which the Web has given new life – affiliate marketing, bundling, customization – Schwartz shows what's necessary to take a business to the top.
He also shows how hard it will be to keep it there. More than any other quality, he emphasizes constant vigilance. Baseball great Satchell Paige told those who sought to duplicate his longevity, "Don't look back – someone might be gaining on you." Schwartz' message is colder: On the Web, someone is always gaining on you. Watch them, or die.
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Smart Business: How Knowledge Communities Can Revolutionize Your Company by Dr. Jim Botkin (Free Press, $26)
If knowledge is power, knowledge withheld is power, too. Smart Business explores the source of a company's knowledge base, and finds it at every level in the chain of command.
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American libraries get more than a billion "hits" a year from a public that, as this book explains, increasingly needs "organizers and navigators, consultants and guides to the new information age."
