Table Of ContentWALL
STREET
JOURNAL
BOOKS
OTHER WALL STREET JOURNAL BOOKS
Breakaway: Small Business
World Business
Focus on Retirement
A Wall Street Journal Book,
published by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2001 by Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any
form.
The Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal Book colophon are
trademarks of Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Cover design by Jennifer Heisey
ISBN-13: 978-0-743215169
ISBN-10: 0-7432-1516-8
Portions of this text were previously published in The Wall Street Journal
“Special Report” copyright © 2000 by Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
CONTENTS
1 A Head Start
2 Choice and Trust
3 Setting an Example
4 At Your Service
5 Talk Big; Win Big
6 The Web’s Dirty Little Secret
7 The Ultimate Weapon
8 Getting Into Gear
9 Our Data, Ourselves
10 Behind the Portal: What’s Yahoo Up To?
11 Compare and Contrast
12 Living Off Bytes
13 Don’t Shoot!
14 Stalled
15 Clicks and Mortar
16 Price Buster
17 Euro-Bots
18 Late to the Party
19 Dad’s Online Adventure
20 Change of Tune
21 That Old Spirit
22 An Unfinished Story
23 From a Call to a Click
24 Home Advantage
25 Roundtable: A Step Back
26 Meet the Family
27 A Matter of Degree
28 Behind the Front Lines
29 Shoot ’Em Out
30 Lawyers vs. the Internet
31 Photo Opportunity
32 Banking On Change
33 Hair Today, Hair Tomorrow
34 Easy Doesn’t Do It
35 Returns to Sender
How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Know Where We Are
36 How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Know Where We Are
37 How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Die
38 How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Deal With Our Doctors
39 How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Stay in Touch With
Family
40 How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Attend Church
41 How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Relate to Our Spouses
42 How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Take Vacations
43 How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Have Babies
44 How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Are Fans
45 How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Listen to the Radio
46 How Technology Has Changed the Way We . . . Do Homework
OTHER WALL STREET JOURNAL BOOKS
Breakaway: Small Business
World Business
Focus on Retirement
ONE
A Head Start
BY DAVID PRINGLE
April 17, 2000
When department-store company Karstadt-Quelle AG started an online
shopping mall back in October 1996, Germany’s retail industry raised a
collective eyebrow.
After all, at that time, fewer than 750,000 German households had access to
the World Wide Web, and the Internet was widely regarded as being only for
teenage technology enthusiasts.
But things changed quickly, and by the end of 1997, five million Germans
were online, according to Jupiter Communications, a New York–based research
group, giving Karstadt a promising prospective market.
What was it that prompted the retail giant to rush into e-commerce so early—
six weeks before it even got around to putting up a basic corporate Web site?
Credit a combination of foresight and fear.
“It was very early for Germany, but we had known about the scenario in the
U.S.,” says Holger Pleines, manager of e-commerce at Karstadt. “And we had
seen that we could have a problem in the future through Internet technology: The
producer of items could sell direct to the customer, and we could lose revenue in
our department stores.”
That’s been the good news for Karstadt and several other European retailers:
Because Europe was about two years behind the U.S. in adopting the Internet as
a retail channel, European retailers had a chance to see beforehand where things
were headed. And with that glimpse of the future, they could try to steer it in
their direction.
What’s more, because there wasn’t a lot of interest in Europe in 1997 in
funding Internet start-ups, conventional retailers had a golden opportunity to
lock out the start-ups before they could get going. “Venture-capital money was
still relatively scarce,” says Joe Sawyer, a senior analyst with Forrester Research
Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., “and it was hard to conjure up a lot of excitement
about Internet pure plays.”
So, how well have these high-street retailers fared? Well, that’s the bad-news
part of the story: It seems many haven’t been able to capitalize on the early start.
Surveys conducted in January by London-based research firm MMXI Europe
show that brick-and-mortar retailers own none of the 10 most-visited retail sites
in the U.K. In Germany, two conventional retailers ranked in the top 10, and in
France, three made the top tier. (Two of the top 10 online merchants in the U.S.
are owned by conventional retailers, according to MMXI.)
Most of the leading retail sites in Europe either are owned by American
Internet companies, notably Amazon.com Inc., or are run by local mail-order
firms such as the U.K.’s Software Warehouse PLC, which founded the popular
site Jungle.com.
Karstadt started early but had to relaunch its online mall, My-World.de., at the
end of 1997 after consumers complained that its initial version was difficult to
navigate. “Karstadt sunk a ton of money into doing their site over and over
again,” says Mr. Sawyer at Forrester.
My-World is only the 26th most-visited retail site in Germany, according to
MMXI. Mr. Pleines won’t disclose what proportion of Karstadt’s sales currently
come through My-World.de, which now stocks 1.2 million product lines. He
