Resumen
Surveying the wreckage of the dot-com marketplace meltdown of 2001, it is easy to overlook the persistence and rapid growth of e-business throughout the U.S. economy. While many high-flying dot-corn firms, including Beyond.com, Boo.com, DrKoop.com, Kozmo.com and Webvan vanished, use of the Internet as an essential business tool continued to grow dramatically. At the peak of the e-business hype in 2000, most pundits ignored the nascent effort of large legacy firms, or those that existed before the advent of e-business and had yet to embrace the Net. A common misperception about e-business was and still is that one either has it or didn't get it. By definition, flashy e-business pure-plays, or the dot-corns, got it and except for a few visionaries, legacy firms didn't. Today, legacy firms represent the future of e-business and understanding e-business from their perspective gives a clearer picture of how e-business will develop in the future. The online grocers represent a clear example. The pure-plays Homegrocer and Webvan received enormous media attention and heavy investment from venture capitalists. Today, both are out of business, while traditional British grocer Tesco has emerged as the most successful grocer online. INSET: Emerging Role of CeCO.