In his view, what is called for is 'a strategy of alliances' rather than a 'strategic alliance':  "Often alliances were struck because of a chance meeting between chief executives. I think those days are over."

So what lessons have been learnt from the dot.com crash?

Gomes-Casseres says: "That very late 90s notion of co-opetition has been discredited. We now know that you can't go out and form an alliance with a company and then go out in the market and kill your partner.

That does not work.  Conflicts of interest make alliances unworkable.  Conflict needs to be understood and fenced against. Look at Fuji Xerox.  It worked for 40 years because Xerox felt free to give the joint-venture everything it knew as there were clearly defined markets where Fuji Xerox could sell."

Gomes-Casseres argues that alliance strategy can make or break even the largest multi-nationals, using the example of IBM: "In the 1970s, IBM was an integrated global company and, like many dominant companies with strong internal controls, it did not see why it need ally itself to anyone.  IBM actually pulled out of India rather than be forced into a joint venture by the government."

This changed disastrously in the 1980s, when IBM allied itself with Microsoft and Intel to launch the IBM PC: "The product and the platform succeeded because of the alliance. Yet, because of the way the alliance had been struck, it left Microsoft and Intel holding the intellectual property rights and IBM lost out badly to Compaq."

"By the mid 1990s, under John Akers, IBM still had not got the alliance message, and was even considering breaking itself up. Yet today IBM is successful in part because of its alliances in components, in services and also with software vendors."

"Alliance strategy can make or break even the largest multi-nationals."

No wonder Gomes-Casseres believes the future belongs to those companies which have the culture, the organisation and the strategy to build global alliances.

Mastering Alliance Strategy, co-authored by James Bamford, Benjamin Gomes-Casseres and Michael Robinson was published in December 2002 by Jossey Bass-Wiley.  Readers should also look at Gomes-Casseres website at Alliancestrategy.com