Customers Are Using B2B Exchanges to Get Prices -- and Buy Offline

If only the computer terminal you're reading this on had a coin slot mounted on its side. That way, it'd be a lot easier to make money off of the Internet.

Yet, as so many business-to-consumer companies have painfully learned in the last six months, that's not the way it works. The Internet, it turns out, is a great medium for communicating and sharing stuff -- like information -- but it's still really hard to make money at it.

A lot of B2B players are in for the same harsh lesson now, some analysts say. As businesses actually start using the Internet to do business, an interesting thing is happening: People who work for businesses, the analysts are finding, act a lot like the people shopping for themselves -- they try to save money. That, in turn, makes it very hard for the companies trying to sell them things to make a profit. ...