Rating: 
Summary: A good read, but could go further
Review: While we are all familiar with e-business, and the basic ideas how it works, there are many questions of strategy that deserve to be examined. This book looks at some of the main issues underlying e-business, and why some companies survive and others don't.Author Schwartz analyzes several forms of selling over the Internet, presenting case studies, and explaining why some companies make it, and others die out. While the book is well-written, concise, and notably free of techno-babble and gee-whizitude, the only thing I feel is lacking is true insight. As a journalist, the author is looking at all this from the outside, having interviewed business execs and dot.com geeks, but lacks any real experience in the business world of his own. All in all it is a valuable read, even though it treats the readers a bit like children (with the little summaries at the end of each chapter called "Executive Survival Guides". Watch out, though - this book was written in 1998, and will quickly be out of date, like many other such books, since the technologies and players change so fast. Read it now, or don't read it at all.
Rating: 
Summary: What was the point?
Review: With a title like Digital Darwinism: etc. etc. one is set with the expectation that this book is a kind of silver bullet. But the question is for whom? Throughout the book I had a constant feeling of a big so what? Who is the audience here? Certainly not me and I am not a player in the web economy. Yet. I certainly neither absorbed nor abstracted anything more that I have from the examples that proliferate through reading profiles in quality business journals or talking to business colleagues. Perhaps maybe an artsie-but non-techno-literate-I-wanna-know person would find it appealing? Aside from this, the book is written in a style that is supposed to engage through permitting the reader to abstract it's key messages from storylines. I felt that it uses a set the scene, stream of consciouness, I am going to tell you a story style that makes Europeans sometimes nauseous and feeling "just get to the point please, the book is small enough!". Go for a book that's not hyped-up from the start and delivers a simple structure for your mind to frame concepts, remember points for further reference and doesn't state the obvious.
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