After you wade through Mary Cronin's 300-page Doing Business on the Internet, you'll have learned that companies are finding e-mail a useful tool for communicating between remote locations, getting technical support for their computers, and chatting with their customers.
What Doing Business on the Internet won't tell you, strangely enough, are real dollars-and-cents issues. You'll find a reference to electronic mail on virtually every page of this book, but you'll be hard-pressed to find a dollar sign.
Cronin's starry-eyed view of the world's information highway suffers from an overdose of hippie politics: Companies that offer information for free over the Net are good. Companies that do not let their employees access the Net for personal use are bad, stupid, or shortsighted. Cronin doesn't even address the possibility that the Net might be an easy way for insiders to leak information to the competition.
The business world needs a hard-hitting text that addresses the real issues of the Net today: Costs, impact on employee productivity, cryptography, and legal pitfalls. The stories in this book will make mid-level managers more interesting at dinner parties, but they won't help them solve the problems they are facing today.
Doing Business on the Internet: How the Electronic Highway is Transforming American Companies, by Mary J. Cronin, US$29.95. Van Nostrand Reinhold: (800) 842 3636, +1 (606) 526 6600.
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