The Industrial Dynamics of Internet Services

This paper has two objectives. First, we seek to comprehend the overarching patterns of structural change underlying the hyper-dynamic processes shaping and reconfiguring the Internet services industry during both the Internet hype period in the late 1990s and the 'post-hype' period after the turn of the milennium. This is done through an empircal account of the evolution in commercial customers' Internet use, the corresponding development of new Internet services, and through an analysis of the evolving competitive and cooperative dynamics in the Internet services. This analysis ecompass an exposition of both the entry-based dynamics and the post-entry positioning dynamics of Internet services. Secondly we try to answer the questions, whether Internet services is rather to be considered a complex value system of interrelated services provided by different types of firms in different industries, than a unitary industry of competing firms.