Working Paper
The Corporate Digital Divide

This paper shows how organizational, technical, and environmental factors affected firm decisions to adopt Internet technologies during the early years of the commercialization of the Internet. Organizations that had made prior investments in client/server networks had a higher likelihood of Internet adoption, however investments in proprietary or platform-specific client/server technologies raised the cost of switching from legacy systems. Small firms and those that were geographically concentrated were less likely to adopt. The study shows that organizations commonly adopted access and intranet technologies together, and suggests that low adaptation costs characterized the rapid diffusion of these early Internet technologies.