Ecommerce Technologies: Managing the Bleeding Edge

Companies are enchanted by the possibilities and the promise of electronic commerce using the Internet and Intranets. However, their expectations have not been realized, and managers have had to develop coping strategies in order to deal with the uncertainty of rapid technological change. This paper discusses the coping strategies of early adopters of ecommerce toward planning and budgeting, human resource management, and technology adoption decisions. Adoption decisions based on expectations of technology survival (i.e., the Microsoft choice ) demonstrate the effects of network externalities on the innovation diffusion cycle