Has the Web succeeded in taking away perhaps just a touch of the advantage that comes from being a massive retailer? This well-reasoned CIO Magazine story does a nice job of exploring that question by looking at whether Wal-Mart's IT department has lost its edge and started to hurt Wal-Mart's dominance.
The piece looks at the mixture of corporate ideas forced onto the stores and whether RFID efforts distracted the company from more practical objectives. A good read.