Has the rise of the Internet's World Wide Web dealt a deathblow to commercial on-line services such as CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy? Observers predicting the demise of the proprietary on-line model are certainly not hard to find. At the same time, in the last year alone, America Online added more than 3 million subscribers and with only about 12 percent of American households actually signed on to an electronic network of any kind, it is too early to judge which of the competing networks will gain the upper hand.

Yet this is an issue that cannot be avoided by the many companies already moving forward with initiatives to reach their customers over one or another of these networks. For some, choosing the wrong network may prove merely expensive. For others, particularly those in businesses where first-mover advantage is important, it could be fatal.

A battle on two fronts?

Advocates of the Internet argue that the standards established around basic communication protocols (TCP/IP) and text description languages (HTML) offer more opportunity for growth and innovation than proprietary technology platforms. They cite the massive shift that occurred in the computer business during the 1980s, from proprietary mainframe and minicomputer architectures...