The container case

摘要

What were they thinking, those punters who bid up business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce stocks so high before the markets crashed earlier this year? Or, for that matter, the hundreds of B2B exchanges that launched into that bubble, only quietly to scale back or shut down in the past six months? Entrepreneurs have launched more than 700 B2B marketplaces, many of them based upon auctions, hoping to create commodity-like markets for everything from chemicals to steel. Most have been guilty of thinking that business transactions are a lot simpler than they really are.