Stefanie Akkerman
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E-Business
Review Questions Chapter 1&2
Professor Tompkins
Stefanie Akkerman
Stefanie Akkerman
000-07-9596
Chapter 1
1. Businesses that deal with wares that you want to inspect and handpick (like
perishable foods) can better not use e-business, as one can’t see from a
generic picture which fruit one wants to pick.
The difficulty of integrating existing databases and transaction processing
software designed for traditional commerce into the software that enables
electronic commerce.
Safety issues: many people (customers) are still afraid that their creditcard
information or other personal information is not well protected on the web.
2. A roommate matching service can combine electronic and traditional
commerce strategies because there are both commodity and personal
inspection elements. The web can help greatly in generating a big number of
potential roommates, and one is able to screen on certain desired
characteristics like a certain age group, non-smokers or male or female. But
before you start living with someone you need a personal opinion as well,
and this is where personal meetings (with agents and roommates) come in,
the traditional way of commerce.
3. The first wave of e-commerce was mainly a United States thing. Most web
pages were in English, directed to U.S. customers. This was especially the
case on commercial sites. The second wave is much more international
oriented, with many countries and languages involved. This obviously has a
lot of advantages, as a bigger market can generate bigger profits, but new
problems like language barriers have emerged (this can potentially be solved
by good translation machines or people who translate).
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4. Transaction costs are all costs associated with gathering information,
negotiating, and fees and commissions for the trading of a product. The costs
of information gathering and acquisition are particularly high, and ecommerce can help significantly in reducing these costs by eliminating a lot
of work associated with information gathering and negotiation.
5. E-commerce could help the construction supplies industry (like a tile
wholesaler), which has been operating as a hierarchy for a long time, change
more into an organization with a network structure. It can do this by
bringing the several suppliers and demanders in touch with each other on
especially for this purpose generated websites, thus enabling them to
coordinate their strategies, resources and skills to form relationships that
will be more efficient. Instead of having department A contact department B
to get something from department C in order to do one transaction, one only
needs to go to the site.
6. They can ask themselves what the strengths would be of using e-commerce
(like a supply buying unit in a cookie factory would be able to buy the
cheapest ingredient that day because it has different suppliers to choose
from), weaknesses (only 2 different suppliers at that time), opportunities
(because of the convenience, more suppliers will be willing to do business)
and threats (competitors who will do the same which might drive prices up).
7. Translation (here machine translation) has a big database with words of
more than 1 language, and just matches these up using the text you put in.
(after specifying the to and from language). Localization can be much more
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accurate, as it also incorporates business and cultural practices and local
dialect variations using real people. This way the translation will be much
more likely to be accurate, and closer to what the real meaning of the text is.
This is important because interpretation can mean a worlds difference,
especially because in doing business the social aspect can not be forgotten,
and can make the process go much smoother.
8. If you want to stimulate business online, you have to make sure people are
not shied away from using the internet for a great number of hours because
it would cost them more. Especially in business it is crucial to be able to be
online whenever necessary, so you won’t lose opportunities. This is where
flat-rate internet works well (the amount of time spent online and the
amount of money paid are not related).
Chapter 2
1. The ‘prehistoric’ internet was only used by the government to control
weapon systems, and it was not open to the public at all. In the 70’s people on
several universities started using a network in order to exchange news and
letters (email) with their computers. This time, the internet was still very
limited though. It wasn’t before first in the 80’s some of these networks
connected, and computers started to become more common in households
and companies, that commercial use was slowly permitted. The real
commercialization came in the 90’s, when the NSF eased restrictions and the
internet became privatized.
2. HTML is a language which programmers use to instruct the computer what a
website must look like, and what it can do (navigation). Because this
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language is widely used, other computers can read it too. HTML text includes
tags (beginning and ending with < and > using standard text in between) that
indicate what is a header, which color a text should have, which page is
behind which link, etc.
Berners-Lee developed HTML trying to improve laboratory research
document handling procedures for his employer He developed the code for
hypertext and put it on internet.
3. A POP (post office protocol) message can tell the email server to send mail to
the user’s computer, and delete it from the server, not delete it or ask
whether new mail arrived. IMAP does the same as POP, but also has extra’s: it
can only send selected messages, enable the user to only read headers, see
the sender’s name, let’s users create mail folders, delete messages and search
for parts of a message.
It is clear that IMAP is preferable, not only for the more extensive
options, but also when you use more than 1 computer IMAP is more useful,
as POP shows your email only from 1 computer.
4. When companies started doing business on the web extensively, there was a
need for a good way to be able to work with large databases online,
something that is difficult with HTML.
XML uses paired start and stop tags, which is similar to the way
database software defines a record structure. When a company shows its
products online, the web pages are marked up with HTML tags, but product
information like prices, numbers and items still in stock are marked up with
XML. In order to be able to communicate with other companies using XML
(and still see the same output, even if the words used are different),
companies have agreed to follow standards for XML tags, which are available
for different industries.
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I would use HTML for example if I would want to show my biography,
or unrelated pictures. I would use XML if I would want to show a list with
sports game contestants showing their name, age, country and pictures,
deriving the information from an existing database, or show the current list
of my employers stock, showing price, product name and number, quantity
left and shipping information, derived from a database.