In the 21st century, the Internet is the doorway to online chat, research, business trade and various other communication related functions. However due to its extensive usage around the world, it is also the means of other, not so positive functions, such as spamming, spreading viruses and illegal music trade. Overall the Internet, with the help of business Intranets is increasing productivity and raising revenue, though at the cost of various jobs.
Over the past few years, Internet usage has been increasing. Last year business usage grew by 3 per cent to 72 percent. However this rate change is expected to decrease in a few years. The previous year, Internet usage only grew by 13%. One factor that may be coming into this is the increased revenue that comes from worldwide exposure. The Internet has increased contact between buyer and seller, due to the ease of communication. Growing web presence can also be seen in the number of Internet orders taken by companies. Revenue rose by almost 2 billion dollars in the 01-02 business year.
However worldwide connection isn’t the only means of communication that has increase revenue for businesses. More functionality is delivered over intranet2 and has reduced interaction costs in many companies and schools. In certain businesses, the increased productivity and therefore increased revenue can be seen in the lower ratio of human resources staff required to deal with various issues. More functionality is delivered over intranet. A four-hour piece of work can now be finished in half an hour, because of the accessibility of various resources. Last year, Cematics was founded, which later continued to release a prototype of Locutus. This is a business intranet that allows users to search corporate networks for information distributed across a wide range of computers. This also means that less temporary staff is required to key in data and act as a medium between resource and consumer. The unified view of enterprise information and applications creates a lower cost and higher productivity.
One industry that has been greatly affected by the Internet has been the entertainment industry. Like the intranet, files can be traded between computers, but online, this spans over 3 billion people per day. Due to file sharing over large peer-to-peer networks and various websites CD sales are down although there may be other factors involved5. However, other kinds of technology are on the rise. Equipment such as CD burners, mp3 players and blank CDs have seen large increases in sales over the past year. Blank CD sales alone have risen 40% from last year, with almost 1.7 billion being purchased. The music industry has had to pay for this by laying off employees to absorb the impact of the falling sales. About 1,800 employees / 20 % of EMI’s staff were dismissed and one executive position was created – global head of antipiracy. The piracy issue is extremely time consuming and has slowed down productivity in the industry, with various meetings held every week with artists, managers and lawyers. In the copy protection wars, low tech is becoming the new high tech, with many artists resorting to distributing vinyl copies for review instead of the typical CD.
One negative by product of the Internet has been the increased unsolicited email – other wise known as spamming. This has decreased productivity, however it has created many jobs to defeat the cause6. The time spent deleting and defeating Spam costs 8.9 billion a year in lost productivity. Humans are now being used over machines to reduce Spam and many workers sit scanning the email entering a server hoping to find a ‘glitch in the matrix’ that shows them suspicious patterns of Spam emails.
Another downside of the Internet has been its facilitation of virus spreading around the world. A virus originating in, say Europe, can be dispersed around the world in a matter of 24 – 48 hours. Spending on security worldwide has grown to a point that it is making a dent in the IT spending chart7. About 5 per cent of the average IT budget is now used to rid various corporations from worms, Trojans, bombs and various other viruses in their systems. Because of this drop in budget, various computing companies are being forced to pull entire teams from areas such as application development, to help one customer to rid their system of viruses like the Blaster worm. However in addition to affecting the corporate business sector, viruses are also interfering with the delivery of education across the state. The education department is struggling to keep their systems secure, while trying to avoid having teachers wasting their time and lowering productivity in class. “Teachers need to get on with teaching, not IT security updates” – Garry Barnes, Information Security Manager8. Nevertheless, there is not much that can be done to help the issue, except hope that virus creators back down. Meanwhile, viruses will continue to eat computer systems over the world as long as they have easy access via the Internet.
To conclude, businesses are largely profiting from various communication resources such as the Internet and the Intranet, however many of it’s function are also causing changes to various business industries. With spamming and illegal file sharing affecting overall IT security revenue and causing limited positive productivity, various companies are being forced to drop employees to compensate for the financial losses.
