Now reality is starting to sink in. Or actually, the rubber-band-like overreaction in the other direction is sinking in: Suddenly everyone's dissing B2B. Can't succeed. Just another Web disaster. As bad as B2C (business-to-consumer). A fraud.
Bah, humbug. B2B's big now, and it's going to get a lot bigger. B2B is now and will continue to be a fundamental part of business purchasing.
But not, it turns out, in the simplistic, gee-whiz way we thought. So often the projections for B2B numbers, and for the ease of building B2B sites and companies, sounded like the Mickey Rooney character in 1939's Babes in Arms: "Hey! Let's put on a show!"
It's not that easy. As a lot of B2B investors have learned, expensively.
Watching the rise and fall and rise again of B2B, and the sorting out of what works and what doesn't, I've discovered what I think are four immutable laws of B2Bdom. They may not be on the level of Newton's Laws, or Moore's Law ("The number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months"), or even Machrone's Law ("The PC you really want always costs $5,000"), but they do embody some important observed phenomena, expressed as truisms:
