Word: boom
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...better way. Sitting in BizBots' San Francisco office, he types in a polypropylene order on his JAM (Java Agent-Enabled Marketplace) prototype for the chemicals industry. A moment passes; then JAM matches Ma's buy order--price, purity, etc.--to a compatible sell order in its order book, and, boom, the deal closes. Phone calls: zero. Time: five minutes. Cost: maybe 10 bucks. "Theoretically," Ma says, smiling, "it makes sense to do everything this...
Indeed, the fear of "getting Amazoned" is fueling a boom in business-to-business e-commerce, a $131 billion-a-year industry that Forrester Research projects will skyrocket to $1.5 trillion by 2003. Colossuses such as GE and Cisco have led the way with "procurement marketplaces": in-house purchasing systems to streamline transactions with their suppliers...
...largest peacetime budget deficit in history this year--the economic engine still shows no sign of catching. True, official statistics say the economy grew an astonishing 1.9% in the first quarter, a number that has mystified observers who look at other indicators and see no evidence of a boom. But there is no sign of a genuine, self-sustaining recovery, and it is all too easy to see how things could get considerably worse--indeed, how Japan could plunge into a nasty deflationary spiral if consumers keep their hands in their pockets...
Witness Robert Mondavi Corp.: for a decade it had increased revenues at an average of 15.5% a year, leading an industrywide wine boom. Profits kept pace until 1998, but then they dropped more than 20% from a year earlier, to $29 million. Partly that was bad luck, the delayed effect of late rains in 1996 that ruined harvests and kept the company from making enough of its best-selling Woodbridge Chardonnay to meet demand a year later. But Mondavi neglected to warn retailers of the shortage and failed to put them on allocation--tell them each store could get only...
...tell the full story behind this year's profit rebound. The Asian turmoil that burned Hewlett-Packard, Rockwell and many other U.S. companies in 1998 has yielded to a weak recovery that is at least less profit-destroying than a continued collapse. Contrary to all predictions, the American boom has not only rolled on but also speeded up. And marketing errors such as Mondavi's are relatively easy to recover from in an atmosphere of rising incomes and free consumer spending. But even if the 1998 profit lag was an aberration, as many economists think, U.S. and global production capacity...