Читать книгу End Of Competition, The: The Impact Of The Network Economy - C N A Molenaar - Страница 22

Technology facilitates change. Technology was initially used in developments to realise greater efficiency, but these days technology is used much more often for connection and communication purposes. Technology is also used to carry out analyses, which helps to bring about a better bond between users and suppliers (commitment and loyalty).

• New methods, such as scrum and micro-services, ensure for a speedy development.

• Modifications of systems, other applications, are based on network facilities.

• The cloud ensures that everyone has access to the desired data at any time and place and that everyone can communicate regardless of where they are.

Although the application of these technological developments has been growing for decades now, it is only in the last few years that we can speak of a convergence, where developments are influencing one another. Both the application and the acceptance have greatly accelerated, in part of course due to the technological possibilities, partly through the economic necessity particularly of China and America and due to the global acceptance by companies and individuals as well.

Products were increasingly no longer made specifically by one single factory; rather, production involved the assembly of various components to form a single product. This not only greatly reinforced the mutual dependency involved in the production but also stimulated specialisation. From a legal point of view, a factory was still an independent entity, but not necessarily when it came to its activities. A factory would sometimes receive semi-manufactured goods, which would then have to be processed further and then sent elsewhere in the world to be finished off and sold to a particular market. This network manufacturing process is also supported by information and communication. Each link in this process is independent yet connected with another link for further processing. And so a chain of independent units, nodes, is created that together formed a single entity. This is the basis for the network economy (Figure 3).

Figure 3. The network structure, independent entities (nodes) are connected.³