Article Link:
By: Roddy Chung
Summary:
Work is no longer constrained by the physical limits of the world. With the Internet, businesses can be much larger than they were before telecommunications became as widespread as they are today. Just think: somewhere, sometime, someone in the world is doing something, contributing to work in one form or another. Businesses today are online - why should it be a surprise that there are businesses online for businesses?
Effect on Business:
Society is no longer constrained by distance or time. If there's one thing that the Internet's done for humanity as a whole, it's brought us closer together. It's also made us busier, thanks to global communications being so prevalent in both home and office. The work day is no longer 9-to-5 on weekdays only, but 24/7, 365 days, always industrious. Imagine: at any time, someone, somewhere, could be working. Right now. With you, or for you, even.
It's happening today. Business may be using telecommunications already to expand and link their work all across the world, businesses THROUGH telecommunications have the potential to become business unto themselves. It's already happening, in fact. With the virtual world of the World Wide Web mirroring the real world in terms of work and businesses, it should only follow that virtual business also exists. Today, business exist online as they do in a physical location, offering many of the same services, such as accountancy, telemarketing, or even secretarial work.
Globalization means outsourcing is more readily done by businesses today than in the past. With potentially the entire world within reach, the chances of having someone/somewhere/sometime available for any given task at hand has been made a lot better than relying upon a single list of workers restricted to a single organization. While this does go against the traditional structure of work cultures, the obsolescence of old ways is being far outweighed by the many, MANY possible benefits of the new.
This especially applies for small businesses that may otherwise not have the skillsets or manpower to expand much further beyond their physical restrictions of space and time. Online, however, one's reach is expanded much further than in the 'real-life' world.
Examples demonstrating the potential of online effort are many. Examples such as Google (google.com), Facebook (social site), or Wikipedia ("The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit") demonstrate the reach of the World Wide Web and industriousness of Internet-wide effort; all three names started as business with a total number of employees that you could count on one hand - today, all three names are multi-million business entities.
The Internet IS making the world smaller. It's only natural that this also applies to the world of work.
