If John Deighton had it his way, he'd drop the prefix "e" from his vocabulary.
Or at the very least, from his business school lectures.
"E-business sounds a little pretentious these days," said Deighton, a professor at Harvard Business School who teaches courses on marketing and information technology.
As he prepares his coursework for a new semester, Deighton says he finds it easier just to use the term "business" across the board. That way, it doesn't matter whether he's talking about online strategy at a diversified pharmaceutical giant like Merck-Medco or analyzing a prominent dot-com, like DoubleClick, and its history of privacy conflicts.
Given the way business is done today, Deighton believes it no longer makes sense to create a separate category for companies that use the Web.
"In a sense, the battle has been won, and the Internet is now central to the vitality of every corporation," he said. "Everybody's an Internet company."
Lately, Deighton is not alone in his desire to redefine the public image of the academic discipline formerly known as e-business.
With a new academic year approaching, a number of U.S. business schools are adjusting their e-business curriculum -- once a focal attraction for budding entrepreneurs -- to account for changing times.
By and large, schools are concentrating less on companies that originated in the era of the Internet gold rush. Instead, they're more likely turning their attention to how more traditional firms are using the Web and electronic communications.
With so many once-promising Internet startups now dead or diminished, the approach is a logical one.
"We do not look at pure dot-coms as the only place for electronic commerce or e-business," said Tridas Mukhopadhyay, director of the Institute for E-Commerce at Carnegie Mellon University. The institute's focus this year will be on how some of the largest U.S. firms are putting more "e" into their business.
The curriculum at Carnegie Mellon isn't dramatically different from past semesters, when students have advised a number of "old-economy" firms -- including Alcoa, Hallmark and Johnson & Johnson -- on subjects like supply chain management and Internet marketing.
In class, Mukhopadhyay also plans to offer up a mix of online and offline companies as e-business discussion fodder. In the dot-com camp, he cites eBay as a prime exemplar of a company with a profitable online business model. Among non-Internet companies, a popular pick is Southwest Airlines to serve as an example of a large firm that uses its website to increase sales and improve customer service.
At Harvard, which supplies case studies of companies to other business schools, the list of best-selling titles also sheds some light on what educators find intriguing.
According to Deighton, the best-selling case study last year looked at the online strategy of Dell Computer, which came into being well before the rise of the commercial Internet.
While the university's publishing arm offers plenty of more Internet-specific case studies -- like Amazon.com or Yahoo -- Deighton believes the Dell example is more applicable to businesses today. The study -- which shows how one company took a medium that threatened to disrupt its very profitable business and turned it instead into a competitive advantage -- seems to strike a chord.
As he prepares for this year, Deighton says he won't put great emphasis on the mounting instances of failure among companies featured in recent case studies. He doesn't plan to get much use out of one of his case studies -- published in May, 2000 -- which analyzes the prospects for the now-defunct grocer Webvan.
"Diagnosis of the kind of errors that were made in the cases of companies like Webvan isn't awfully productive," Deighton said, adding that he plans to concentrate on more promising Internet ventures, such as companies that offer online conferences and meeting services.
But not everyone in academia is backing away from ghoulish rumination on the dot-com decline.
Andrew Whinston, director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce at the University of Texas at Austin, plans to spend a great deal of time analyzing the reasons why Internet burnouts like eToys and Pets.com were doomed to failure.
To carry out this mission, Whinston says he will rely extensively on an unlikely expert: a French mathematician named Joseph Bertrand whose most famous economic theory was published back in 1883.
While Bertrand was more than a century too early for the Internet bubble, Whinston claims that the Frenchman's writings contain everything one needs to know about why companies such as eToys and Pets.com -- which engaged in fierce price competition against larger, more established rivals -- never had much chance of success.
While such analytical exercises will never bring back the fallen firms from the dead, Whinston argues that these kinds of studies are a tremendously useful activity for students.
"We're showing the business or economic model that would explain their failure, so it would get students to understand how in the future they could proceed to avoid these problems," he said.
