In fact, even larger businesses with bigger IT staffs are finding that in this early stage of first-generation products and unclear marketing equations, jumping into complex stuff is not a winning proposition. The bulk of their activity revolves around four key activities. Homepage support is also key, and if you look at where small businesses and their local ISPs are most linked, it's in this area. Even when a small company has a local focus, it turns out that having a homepage can be essential. This is especially true as environments like Geocities make the World Wide Web a local entity.
Email is the next common application.
There's not much to be said here. Electronic messaging is becoming a fixture in daily life, and many smaller firms that work with or are customers of larger ones find that email is the only way to have consistent communications. Free email has become so common that it even beats the cost of regular mail for a lot of business correspondence. The last of the big four applications is the existence of an intranet. The ability to lower IT cost and complexity using IP as a replacement for other communication products is attractive to many smaller firms.