The Net Economy wishes happy e-birthdays

Let's all celebrate this! July 16 was a big day in Amazon's history. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth in the series on schoolboy wizardry, was released with all-time record advance orders from the online store of 1.5 million. On the same day, Amazon broadcast a live concert on its website to mark the day in 1995 when it "first opened its virtual doors for business".
E-commerce is celebrating its tenth birthday this year. On the last weekend in June, online auctioneer eBay held a gala anniversary dinner in its home town of San José. Yahoo!, a portal site, can also claim this year as its tenth. Only the search engine, Google, of the firms that in the internet decade have emerged as the big four of online business, is younger. In their brief history, most online businesses have found profits harder to come by than publicity. Many early stars crumbled to dust (remember Webvan, pets.com and Boo.com?), and Amazon's string of losses (which touched $1.4 billion in 2000) only turned to profits in 2003.
Most online successes began, as the myth requires, with a couple of geeks in a garage and were then taken over, sooner or later, by professional managers. Geeks are not generally good at moving on from the ideas they give birth to. The notable exception is Amazon, where Jeff Bezos is still at the helm although a recent article in the New York Times posed a question that many others have asked: "Has Amazon Outgrown its Founder?"
What might drive the next round of e-commerce business models? Brynjolfsson says that two new technologies are already throwing up opportunities: mobile access to the internet and RFID tags, which enable the non-stop monitoring of the whereabouts of goods. Wharton's Amit says that the old-fashioned offline world was one where producers said to customers: "I've made this; buy it from me at this price." In the online world, customers are saying, "I want this; sell it to me at this price." That is why these internet birthdays really are worth celebrating.