Re: FW: Parties and Partners

[Murray Maloney <murray@muzmo.com>]

At 01:31 PM 10/19/00 -0400, David RR Webber wrote:
>Conclusion - market - we're simply talking here about
>any pairwise commerce activity centered around a
>vertical service or product.  I find that confusing.
>Market to me implies much more than a simple stall
>or stand model, most importantly it implies plural.

I am confused by your confusion. Let's work through this, OK?

A market can be as small as a 'Bob's Bait Shop' and as big as Covisint.
The context provided by 'Market' is fairly broad, but it includes
any party or parties prepared to engage in electronic business transactions.

Thus, I can have a market in which Parties are Registered with a
central authority, and their 'Business Processes', 'Interfaces',
and 'Core Components' are available through a central 'Repository'.
This is what the current TA document describes, I think.

Or I can have a market in which there is a fixed set of interfaces
and all parties are authenticated through an external agency,
like a credit bureau, or a market maker. Consider the Coke machine
and the cell phone. The Coke Machine publishes its interface --
select(Flavor), purchase(). The cell phone implements the interface.
The phone service provider pays the fee. If all cell phones support
the select/purchase interface, then no negotiation is required.

Or I can have a market in which Parties publish their own information
and negotiate their ability to transact business on-the-fly. 

I am not proposing that ebXML should attempt to implement all of 
this in V1.0. Rather, I am suggesting that the model must be 
sufficient to meet the needs of later iterations, else it won't
hold up as an architecture.

So, a market includes parties engaged in ecommerce transactions.
They discover each other through public interfaces like Reg/Rep
or pre-agreed private interfaces. Having discovered each others'
interfaces, they can negotiate through those interfaces to learn
how to do business with each other. They can conduct business 
through value-added networks and exchanges, or through private
networks. 

Thus, 'Market' and 'Party' and helpful terms and concepts that 
allow you to talk about ecommerce in language that would be 
perfectly understandable to anyone with even a rudimentary 
understanding of how the real world actually operates day-to-day.

Are we still far apart?