Netsourcing: Renting Business Applications and Services Over a Network

Chapter 9. Past, Present, and Future of Netsourcing

The emergence of new markets has happened systematically in the past, allowing for reasonable predictions in new markets, such as netsourcing. The industry life cycle, first described in 1975 by Harold Fox, is an S-shaped curve that describes unit sales of a product/industry over time. Although there are many tweaks and variations of this model, an adaptation of the industry life cycle in Philip Kotler's book Marketing Management^[1] is likely to fit the evolution of netsourcing. The curve describes five distinct phases of a new industry: embryonic, growth, shakeout, maturity, and decline (Figure 9.1). In this chapter we adopt some of the ideas of the industry life cycle to describe what is happening ...