Partnerships with separate companies would be feasible for all process steps in the production flow. Small companies that focus on a core of value-added services would proliferate. Adaptive businesses would be radically restructured. This is not some fantasy, but a description of information-age business. With the Internet, information products can spread globally with near-zero latency.
Most modern businesses are information businesses at their core.
The optimal scope of an information technology business is defined by the connectivity and latency of its information systems. Business boundaries have been reinforced historically by the relative hassles of wide-area connectivity and proprietary network integration. Companies became islands of automation. This shift in program partitioning between desktop and server is a byproduct of the shifts in network connectivity and latency. When a programmer thinks about how to partition an application between various computers, a critical factor is the network connectivity between machines.