Within a few months the main customers in the area shifted to the European supplier. In the new mental geography created by the railroad, humanity mastered distance. In the mental geography of e-commerce, distance has been eliminated. There is only one economy and only one market. One consequence of this is that every business must become globally competitive, even if it manufactures or sells only within a local or regional market.
Every company has to become transnational in the way it is run.
Yet the traditional multinational may well become obsolete. It manufactures and distributes in a number of distinct geographies, in which it is a local company. But in e-commerce there are neither local companies nor distinct geographies. Where to manufacture, where to sell, and how to sell will remain important business decisions. But in another twenty years they may no longer determine what a company does, how it does it, and where it does it.