Rating: 
Summary: A Must Read If You Want To Follow E-Commerce
Review: While a lot has been written about e-commerce, the author does a great job in explaining the underlying drivers of the "New Economy." I found the book to be very insightful and think that it will help anyone involved with the Internet.
Rating: 
Summary: Generic, old insights
Review: Not worth reading - a lot of boring repeats from what's well known
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Summary: Finally the importance of Internet described rationally
Review: There are smart 'kids' - and then there are smart and experienced business strategists: This book finally combiens both aspects of the new way to run businesses for both sides to understand and deal with... For anyone who is successful in business and is bewildered by what happened in the last 5 years - and for anyone who is successful today in the Internet world and has no idea about what made the 'rest of the world' successful - and for anyone who is young in heart and mind and is challenged trying to understand the real meaning of what is going on out there with the 'net': THIS IS THE BOOK OF THE YEAR!
Rating:
Summary: Truly insightful; very useful for managers & entrepreneurs
Review: This is an important and thought-provoking book. In a world full of hype and simplistic answers, the authors have provided a very powerful strategic lens for understanding what's happening in today's business world. Their "richness-reach" framework and the stories that illustrate it are fascinating. More importantly, it provides compelling logic for why the many businesses not yet affected by the Internet must begin to "deconstruct" their own value chains and get ahead of the curve. This book is already being passed around in at least two major companies I know and is contributing to a rethinking of next year's priorities. While it's a bit dense and does not provide easy answers, I think it's a must read.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs more of a direction
Review: This is a very good book, but can be frustrating to read because the authors meticulously keep from being decisive about possible outcomes at points. Even if wrong, it is often useful to take a stance and then matters clarify. Smart people who have a great grasp of these issues, but stopped short.
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Summary: Interesting Insight into the New Economics of Information
Review: Richness or reach? The trade-off used to be simple but absolute: your business strategy either could be focus on "rich" information-customized products and services tailored to a niche audience-or could reach out to a larger market, but with watered-down information that sacrificed richness in favour of a broad, general appeal. Much of business strategy as we know it today rests on this fundamental dilemma.Now, say Evans and Wurster, the new economics of information is eliminating the trade off between richness and reach, blowing apart the foundations of traditional business strategy. Blown to Bits reveals how the spread of connectivity and common standards is redefining the information channels that link businesses with their customers, suppliers, and employees. Increasingly, your customers will have rich access to a universe of alternatives, your suppliers will exploit direct access to your customers, and your competitors will pick off the most profitable parts of your value chain. Your competitive advantage is up for grabs. To prepare corporate executives and entrepreneurs alike for a fundamental change in business competition, Evans and Wurster expand and illuminate groundbreaking concepts first explored in their award-winning Harvard Business Review article "Strategy and the New Economics of Information", and present a practical guide for applying them. Examples span the spectrum of industries-from financial services to health care, from consumer to industrial goods, and from media to retailing. Blown to Bits shows how to build new strategies that reflect a world in which richness and reach go hand in hand and how to make the most of the new forces shaping competitive advantage. Philip Evans is a Senior Vice President of The Boston Consulting Group. Thomas S. Wurster is a Vice President of The Boston Consulting Group in Los Angeles. The authors are co-leaders of The Boston Consulting Group's Media and Convergence Practice. Reviewed by Azlan Adnan. Formerly Business Development Manager with KPMG, Azlan is currently Managing Partner of Azlan & Koh Knowledge and Professional Management Group, an education and management consulting practice based in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysian Borneo. He holds a Master's degree in International Business and Management from the Westminster Business School in London.
Rating:
Summary: Searching for the intersection of Strategy and Information
Review: Your reaction to this book will depend very much on the training and perspective you bring and why you want to read it. If you are much like Charles Ferguson, the author of the excellent "High Stakes, No Prisoners," you already have intimate knowledge of this industry and its players, AND you have a strong grasp of both technology and economics. The marginal gain from this book will be de minimus, but you will appreciate its clarity and scholarship. I think I understand more about business strategy than an average bear, but I also believe that a bunch of children are creating a new reality that is destroying those models, and I began reading some books--this was one of them--to help me try to understand what that will mean for business strategy. I found the book valuable. While I think some of the authors' opinions--consider the hypothesis at the top of page 107--beg to be tested empirically, the references are both current and relevant, the book is clear, and I found it thoughtfully done. You don't have to be an academic to read it. The authors don't use much jargon that they don't explain, and they go to some lengths to avoid using words like isoquant. I'd contrast this book with the very popular "Killer App," which I found trivial. "Blown to Bits" is superior in its clarity and breadth, and in the quality and relevance of its cited source material. I mention the contrast only because you may tend to listen more carefully to people who know a lot about what they are talking about, and my impression is that Evans and Wurster do. If you are reasonably well-trained or experienced in business strategy, but feel like you need to better integrate the transformation to an information-based economy into your models and your thinking, I recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A valuable e-business classic - but lacks an epilogue
Review: This book is an important e-business classic. But despite the authors' clever recommendations, an epilogue is missing, as the Internet revolution they announced did not materialise. The Internet EVOLUTION, however, lives on.
Blown to Bits is about the consequences of the Internet for businesses.
The most important conclusion in the book is that the combination of increased bandwidth, global interconnected electronic network, faster computers and open standards are abolishing the requirements up to now of balancing information reach with information richness.
One example is the alternative media that a company can select when potential customers are targeted. Newspaper ads can reach a broad audience with a limited and static message. At the other end of the scale, a personal meeting with the customer gives the opportunity for deep, detailed and interactive information.
Businesses' supply chains include the same balancing act. When firms do business, the number of partners is inversely correlated to the richness in the information of the interchange.
The Internet removes this balancing act because you suddenly can reach many partners without compromising on the level of detail and complexity of the information (vast reach AND vast richness).
According to the authors, the consequence is that the value chain is blown to bits. They call it deconstruction, which happens when the things economy increasingly is separated from the information economy. "Information is the kit that binds the value chains and supply chains". But the kit is eroding. Information is no longer embedded in the physical units. The economy for physical things and the economy for information are fundamentally different. Unlike physical assets, information (an idea, illustration, checklist, article, etc.) can be reproduced costless infinitely. And where things are worn out, information remains their original form.
Blown to bits contains a wealth of well-described cases like newspapers, banks, car dealers, stock brokers, computer hardware and last not least Encyclopaedia Britannica. In addition, the book includes many interesting text boxes with questions the reader can use for further consideration.
In the bright light of hindsight!
Blown to bits was published in the roaring heydays of the dot-com wave ... and it shows. In 2001, two years after Blown to bits was published, the authors admitted their mistakes in an article for their employer, Boston Consulting Group. They summarised the evolution:
1) It is increasingly clear that the new economy is not displacing the old one. Instead the old is in the process of transforming itself from within.
2) The Internet is NOT proving to be a disruptive technology (i.e. characterised by eliminating the advantages for existing market players). Instead, incumbents are using it to challenge their own business models.
3) Information does not, in general, "want to be free"; instead, intellectual property rights are being extended.
This does not imply that the Internet won't change a lot. Nor can we all can return safely to the good old ways of doing business. Rather, it means that all incumbents have got a second chance to get e-business right.
This conclusion concurs with the view of strategy professor Michael Porter (quoted August 2001 in Business Week)
"We need to see the Internet as complementary to other things the company does rather than contradictory or cannibalistic. That was a really fundamental mistake that many people made. They assumed that this was a disruptive technology that existing companies could not embrace as efficiently as a new company coming in with a clean sheet of paper.
And Porter concludes: "The Internet as a family of technologies will have a very powerful effect on operational effectiveness. We'll see deeper integration among service, sales, logistics, manufacturing, and suppliers."
Peter Leerskov,
MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business
Rating:
Summary: Internet Hype
Review: BLOWN TO BITS
How the new Economics of Information transforms Strategy
Authored by Philip Evans & Thomas S. Wurster By Mike Jones
Management Information Systems
05/27/03 This book is about how the new age of technology dealing with the way information has changed the business environment forever. It starts out with the example of Encyclopedia Britanica and how they were leaders in their field in the late eighties and early nineties. Though they were very pricey the sales force targeted families with young children and the parents had to have this source of valuable information for their children. Sales were very high and there was no competition for the Encyclopedia icon. Everything was great until the computer age took hold and all of a sudden you could get that same information on a little round disk known as a CD-ROM for a fraction of the cost. That disk was even being given away with the purchase of a microcomputer that people could use for other things as well. This goes to show us that even the strongest business can be blind sided when they least expect it. Moral to be learned here is that "even the most venerable can be the most vulnerable".
All businesses are information businesses and the information is the main glue that holds any business together. The business of information is different than the business of things. When something is sold, the seller no longer owns it but when a piece of information is sold, the seller still has access to that information and can sell it again. Although the two are different they are still very much linked together as all things consist of some kind of information.
One of the most fundamental issues of the information business in the beginning was the dilemma of Richness and Reach. It was nearly impossible to have both Richness and Reach in information but the rise of the computer industry and the Internet has changed that forever. There are six aspects that come into play when talking about Richness of information and they are Bandwidth, interactivity, reliability, security, currency and the degree to which the information can be customized. This has all changed with the computer. This change is melting the informational glue, as we know it. It "deconstructs" value chains, supply chains, franchises and organizations. The definition of deconstruction is the reformulation of traditional business structures. The newspaper industry and retail banking is just a couple of businesses that have been deconstructed. You used to have to go to the bank to do your banking and newspapers were either delivered or you had to go get them. Now both can be done via the personal computer at nearly no cost and in a fraction of the time. Deconstruction does a lot of damage at first and hits where a company can least afford it and if a company is willing to accept the change it can make it through tough times.
Intermediaries exist because of the trade off between richness and reach. The deconstruction of the old intermediaries is known as disinter mediation and the creation of the new intermediaries is known as navigation. Disinter mediation used to be about substituting reach for richness but now it is about transforming them both. This will happen where a company can least afford it. The new navigators compete against each other on richness, reach and affiliation. The key is reach but reach is clutter without navigation. We need navigation to find what we want. Navigators are not consumer oriented even though consumers use them. They are supplier oriented because the supplier needs to get their product to the consumer. Reach has developed faster than navigation but we are slowly catching up.
Navigators affiliate mostly with suppliers but are starting to lean toward affiliating themselves with the consumer. This is surprising that this is only happening now and hasn't happened in the past. Navigation is worth more than the supplier business due to the need for navigation because without navigation the products and services would not get to the consumer.
Adding richness is the most powerful way to put off deconstruction due to the fact that if your giving people what they want you will stay in business. You need to be giving them something they don't already have which makes the consumer your biggest competitor. Richness goes up as reach increases. As richness and reach escalate so does the competitive advantage and intensity at all levels of the supply chain.
In closing I would like to say one thing and that is business has changed forever with the desktop workstations and microcomputers and the Internet. People are touching out to one another unlike they have ever done before. Networks are connected to networks all over the world. A message can get across the globe with the touch of a keyboard. Business is ever changing and will continue to change for a long time to come. We will either keep up and make the changes necessary or we will be left behind and fail. As it said in the book "The winner is not the player who understands the endgame. There is no endgame. The winner is the player who sees just one or two moves further ahead than the competitors".
Rating: 
Summary: A good beginning
Review: In this book Messrs. Evans and Wurster offer some rough-and-ready tools for those interested in this topic to apply in the real world (of course not in a cyber one). In short, the authors boil down the intricate constraints encounters by people into 2 perspectives: reach and richness. On this premise Messrs. Evans and Wurster attempt to conceptualize the world of information into a few manageable models. Easy to read but the elaborations are skin-deep. Good for beginners.
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