The future of business

Within less than a decade, the Internet has grown from being an obscure technology used by government officials and academics to what many have heralded as the future of business. With phenomenal and unprecedented growth in the number of users, as well as the amount information that can be accessed, the Internet has become the faster growing medium in history.

Because the rise in Internet usage has been so fast, it is real business impact has often been hard to access. At the close of last millennium, it seemed that the new breed of slick and shiny internet start-up would be the real winners of the online era. Traditional bricks and mortar business were confined to the sidelines as the real world and cyberspace seems completely incompatible.

The success of both large and small real world business on the Internet, however, has brought about a radical rethinking of the significance of e-business. Many more companies are reaping real and substantial rewards via their online efforts. There are the big US names of web profitability (AOL, Yahoo, eBay and so on), but there are also thousands of small companies around the world that have figured out how to make profit. Equally, more established companies of the web to expand their business to offer customers better service.

While the Internet is now universally recognized as being an important business medium, many business owners and managers remain unclear about what it can do for them. To gain this understanding, it is important to comprehend why, when and how people use the net. It is also necessary to be aware of the wide business use it can be put to (as we have seen, this extends far beyond use sales increase).