Paul Kapustka notes in his most recent networking pipeline blog that small business is where we should be looking for growth in IT purchasing. As Paul points out, it is much more difficult for journalists and market analysts to pay attention to the behavior of small businesses -- but we all need to become better at understanding small business as a key underlying economic trend.
If Geoffrey Moore is right, the Internet is accelerating a movement toward what you could call the Fractalized Enterprise. Geoffrey explains his "core vs. context" concept as follows:
Activities that support ... differentiation are core to our businesses. Everything else we do, by contrast, is context -- that is, work that has to get done but cannot improve our valuation.
The interesting thing about the Internet is that it creates the opportunity to outsource context seamlessly. Every business can appear to be a big business, can have endless resources to handle customer support, sales, product development, marketing -- all by weaving together a team of disparate entities (organizational fractals) that cooperate together to create an enterprise.
That is the future -- small businesses, often sole proprietors, working together, mediated by IT, creating, marketing, distrubuting the brands, products, and ideas that we all consume. Much more powerful than corporations.
Of course our technology, government regulations, and personal dispositions must all continue to evolve for this to fully fractalize.
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