Electronic Commerce
Worldwide Growth of the Digital Economy
Two facets of the "digital economy," electronic commerce(i.e., business processes that shift transactions to the Internetor some other, nonproprietary Web-based system) and the informationtechnology industries that make e-commerce possible, are growingand changing at breathtaking speed.The value of e-commerce transactions, while still small relativeto the size of the economy, continues to grow at a remarkablerate. More significant than the dollar amount of these transactions,however, are the new business processes e-commerce enables andthe new business models it is generating. Both the new Internet-basedcompanies and the traditional producers of goods and servicesare transforming their business processes into e-commerce processesin an effort to lower…
