How to Approach the eMarketplace Space

The evolution of the medieval marketplace was briefly discussed in Chapter 2, contextualizing how the Internet has followed somewhat predictable lines of maturity. The evolution of eMarketplaces and how to approach them interests us here because of the specific relevance to the development of competition and co-opetition in the new Internet-based landscape of financial services. Using history as a mechanism for comparison, one must say that medieval commerce did not just appear: it evolved as a direct product of the convergence of transportation and commercial technologies, in response to rising demand for a wider range of goods and services which transcended the traditional geographic boundaries of feudal communities. Basically, as medieval people became more aware of the products of the world and the infrastructure to get these goods to them improved, they matched their purchasing to the rising lifestyles and new levels of wealth. Reviewing the evolutionary path that medieval markets followed to their ultimate maturity as they transformed into the marketplaces of Renaissance Europe, one can see striking similarities in the contemporary developments of Internet commerce. As seen in Chapter 9, the ultimate death of the baby-boom generation over the next 20–30 years will be the second major transition of wealth between two generations since the Black Death.