The following is a quote from Bill Gates from an April 1999 issue of Times Magazine:

“As a business manager, you need to take a hard look at your core competencies. Revisit the areas of your company that isn’t directly involved in those competencies, and consider whether Web technologies can enable you to spin off those tasks. Let another company take over the management responsibilities for that work, and use modern communication technology to work closely with the people – now partners instead of employees are doing the work. In the Web work style, employees can push the freedom the Web provides to its limits.”

This next quote is from Inc. magazine in January 1999.

In their book Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance (Harvard Business Press), Mui and co-author Larry Downes urge companies to perform internally only those activities that can’t be performed more cheaply in the open marketplace. When the marketplace in question is the Internet, where vendors with only “dot com” over their head can operate at very low costs, the savings from pushing out business tasks is considerable.