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Footnote

Rez. in: JASIST 55(2004) no.2, S.181-182 (J. Scholl): "The book is based an a doctoral thesis titled "Global opportunity and national political economy: The development of internet ventures in Germany," which was supervised by Razeen Sally and accepted at the International Relations Department of the London School of Economics & Political Science, UK, in 2002. Its primary audience, although it is certainly of interest to policy makers, trade press journalists, and industry practitioners, is the academic community, and, in particular, (international) policy, business, business history, information technology, and information science scholars. The book's self-stated purpose is to explain "why Europe, despite initiating a tremendous amount of change ... failed to produce independent internet ventures of note" (p. 1) in contrast to the United States, where Internet start-ups such as Amazon.com, eBay, E*trade, and Yahoo managed to survive the notorious dot.com shakeout of 200I-2002. A few pages down, the objective is restated as "to explore the hypothesis of a global opportunity for technology innovation delivered via the internet and to explain Europe's entrepreneurial response" (p. 4). As a proxy case for Europe, the study provides a broad account of the changing legal and socioeconomic setting during the phase of early Internet adoption and development in Germany throughout the 1990s. The author highlights and details various facets of the entrepreneurial opportunity and compares the German case in some detail to corresponding developments in Sweden. Waesche concludes that starting an Internet business in Germany during that particular period of time was a "wrong country, wrong time" (p. I86) proposition.
Assessing the book's academic contribution presents a challenging task, which would have been easier to perform had the purpose been stated more precisely. To the business historian the study casts some light an a relatively short period of time (basically the years 1995 to 1998) of German technology-related policy making, its short-term effects, and the fate of a special breed of entrepreneurial activity during that period of time. The study demonstrates that German Start-ups could not help but miss a global opportunity should that opportunity have existed an a broad scale, at all (for example, why, globally speaking, are there only U.S. survivors of the first wave of "pure" Internet businesses? In other words, to what extent was the opportunity already a global one at that early stage?). The reviewer tends to be skeptical regarding that conjecture. Today, the New Economy euphoria has vanished in favor of a more realistic perspective that acknowledges the tremendous long-term potential of an increasingly global economy with the Internet as an important backbone of this development. In fact, meanwhile it has become undeniable that so-called Old Economy organizations (including governments) were relatively quick an their feet in embracing and even driving the new technological opportunities, therefore contributing to the global change and opportunity decisively more than all first and second-wave Internet startups taken together. Rather than Old versus New Economy, the Internet has challenged almost every organization around the world to change the old way in favor of a new, Internet-related way of doing business. In that regard, the pure Internet entrepreneurial opportunity existed only for a short while when traditional businesses had difficulties to acknowledge the extent and immediacy of the opportunity/threat of a new business model. It is revealing, for example, that Amazon.com, in order to survive, had to divert from its original broker-type model to more traditional ways of retailing books, CDs, Computer equipment, etc., with most of the backend logistics not far from those of traditional players. A 2002 dissertation and a 2003 book should, it is felt, be more critically reflective in that regard rather than stick to a 1998 perspective of an assumed immediate and revolutionary change from brick-and-mortar-based business to a "clicks and cookies" economy.