1. The industrial aspects are mostly internalized and can be regarded as endogenous parameters (see 2.1.5).
2. Strategic data of interest are, e. g.: number of on-line users, current and future penetration of enabled access devices (see 2.1.2), market shares of operating systems and browsers, price elasticity and aggregated demand, conjoint analysis about singular applications an pricing models, actual and potential revenue of market segments such as Internet access, Email, content, ecommerce, advertising, services, deployment of access network technology.
3. Stuart Feldman at his keynote speech at the conference on the legal and policy framework for global electronic commerce at UC Berkeley, March 5, 1999. He stated in the context about the growth and economic contribution of the digital e-conomy that forecasts vary drastically, sometimes even with a five-fold difference. He concluded that the only mutual insight are the rapid growth predictions, while concrete quantitative statements appear divergent and ultimately worthless.
4. The overwhelming success of Apple’s iMac is an obvious indicator that people are willing to pay an extra premium in order to have a stable and user friendly computing product. Future web-enabled consumer electronics devices promise improvements in the same direction. The micro computer is a product, which carries enormous complexity and has so far failed to offer stable technology serving invisible in the background and is consequently devoted to user friendly focus. It seems to be common sense that future mass market products have a much more user friendly design than current computing devices which have failed to exceed a 30%-50% adoption rate.
5. See Utterback (1994), pp. 23-26 for the notion on dominant designs. He points out that a dominant product design generally goes along with dominant market structures as well (ibid.), pp. 32-35, which is caused by positive returns to scale. This effect is particularly strong in network markets.