This book is a case study in industrial economics, using the computing industry as a base at a time when it was undergoing drastic changes. The objective was to identify and analyze those major forces and mechanisms which account for the evolution of an industry. The approach is to recognize the diversity of enterprises and to explore the interplay between products, production processes and the characteristics of enterprises, including their organization and management systems, which business experience indeed shows can be decisive competitive advantages or disadvantages. One might expect the analysis of competitive processes to be readily available in the economic literature, but most economists treat firms as black boxes, ignoring their differences. Beyond providing the basic concepts and mechanisms, mainstream economics are of little help here, since their fundamental paradigms of competition and equilibrium all but ignore the real-world notions of enterprise, differentiation and competition. To understand the internal working of enterprises, one has to turn to the so-called "management" literature, which unfortunately most often stops at the border of the enterprise and seldom tackles the interplay between internal choices and the workings of the market. The separation of those two disciplines is an essential weakness when considering the subject of this book. Economic theory uses too schematic a view of the firm, and organizational theory has too little concern for the market environment. This book attempts to combine those two strands of thought into one theory of industrial structure. Its subject, one particular industry, is limited enough for theory to be always confronted with the experience of the business professional. At the same time, that subject is comprehensive enough to allow moving beyond a pure monograph and to support the beginnings of new conceptual developments. The same approach and concepts could prove useful in the analysis of other complex industries, and perhaps form a starting point for more general contributions to research into industry structures. This book was originally written in French and published in 1996, based on research done in 1994/1995 and on the statistics available at that time. The author translated it into English, but the French publisher could not find an English-language counterpart. The French version is now out of print and the publisher has renounced the rights. New publishing techniques, including print on demand, now allow an independent publisher to make a book available in printed form with a minimal investment. The world has changed since the book was written, most notably computers and the computing industry. There have been giant advances in microelectronics and in their applications to all walks of life. Many firms and products have disappeared, and many new have emerged. Many catch-phrases are now obsolete; new ones are now popular. Also, the easily accessible industry statistics that I used have been discontinued. Updating the book to 2013 would involve a complete rewrite and extensive additional research. But I happen to believe that the approach and concepts put forward in 1996 are still worth publishing in their original state. Concerning the analytical approach and the conclusions, I leave it to the reader to evaluate which are obsolete and which are still valid today. Concerning the predictions that I ventured at the time on the basis of that analysis, it turns out that they did materialize to a large extent. At any rate, the factual part, i. e. the history and the industry statistics in the period 1950-1995, may still be of interest as far as it goes. Be that as it may, I urge the reader to constantly keep in mind that the book was written in 1995, using data available at that time, relying on the technologies of the time and on whatever literature I was able to lay my hands on. In the context of this book, "today" must always be understood as "in 1995."

The untold history of women and computing: how pioneering women succeeded in a field shaped by gender biases. Today, women earn a relatively low percentage of computer science degrees and hold proportionately few technical computing jobs. Meanwhile, the stereotype of the male "computer geek" seems to be everywhere in popular culture. Few people know that women were a significant presence in the early decades of computing in both the United States and Britain. Indeed, programming in postwar years was considered woman's work (perhaps in contrast to the more manly task of building the computers themselves). In Recoding Gender, Janet Abbate explores the untold history of women in computer science and programming from the Second World War to the late twentieth century. Demonstrating how gender has shaped the culture of computing, she offers a valuable historical perspective on today's concerns over women's underrepresentation in the field. Abbate describes the experiences of women who worked with the earliest electronic digital computers: Colossus, the wartime codebreaking computer at Bletchley Park outside London, and the American ENIAC, developed to calculate ballistics. She examines postwar methods for recruiting programmers, and the 1960s redefinition of programming as the more masculine "software engineering." She describes the social and business innovations of two early software entrepreneurs, Elsie Shutt and Stephanie Shirley; and she examines the career paths of women in academic computer science. Abbate's account of the bold and creative strategies of women who loved computing work, excelled at it, and forged successful careers will provide inspiration for those working to change gendered computing culture.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Co-creativity has become a significant cultural and economic phenomenon. Media consumers have become media producers. This book offers a rich description and analysis of the emerging participatory, co-creative relationships within the videogames industry. Banks discusses the challenges of incorporating these co-creative relationships into the development process. Drawing on a decade of research within the industry, the book gives us valuable insight into the continually changing and growing world of video games.

The "Top 25 Telecommunications KPIs of 2011-2012" report provides insights into the state of telecommunications performance measurement today by listing and analyzing the most visited KPIs for this industry on smartKPIs.com in 2011. In addition to KPI names, it contains a detailed description of each KPI, in the standard smartKPIs.com KPI documentation format, that includes fields such as: definition, purpose, calculation, limitation, overall notes and additional resources. This product is part of the "Top KPIs of 2011-2012" series of reports and a result of the research program conducted by the analysts of smartKPIs.com in the area of integrated performance management and measurement. SmartKPIs.com hosts the largest catalogue of thoroughly documented KPI examples, representing an excellent platform for research and dissemination of insights on KPIs and related topics. The hundreds of thousands of visits to smartKPIs.com and the thousands of KPIs visited, bookmarked and rated by members of this online community in 2011 provided a rich data set, which combined with further analysis from the editorial team, formed the basis of these research reports.

From Pilgrim Pulpit to the Electronic Era fills a long existing void in the study of American public address. In this comprehensive and fascinating discussion of the history and evolution of religious communication in the United States, Professor Cotham has provided a lexicon of a wide range of speakers--from early colonial preachers to modern-day religious and spiritual leaders. Fortunately, the text has included an examination of various non-Christian religious leaders and speakers including American Muslims, Native Americans, and American Jews. Women, African-Americans; national political speakers are included as are writers, artists, and even entertainers.

While well-researched and amply illustrated, the text is narrated with an engaging and readable style that appeals both to university students and general readers. What an excellent classroom text And what a welcome addition to the library of anyone seeking to understand how religious communication has been instrumental in shaping our American history and our American culture --Margaret McCree, Professor, Middle Tennessee State University

For e-commerce to work and be implemented successfully, specific skills and knowledge are required - in the fields of information and communications technology (ICT) and business and marketing management in particular. Research in South Africa indicates a growing need for training in managing e-commerce. This book attempts to train people in understanding the ICT principles that underlie e-commerce and e-commerce management against the background of this need, in a disciplined and dedicated way that aims to satisfy specific business needs and meet objectives.