The notion of what it means to be a retail company will change in five years when there are a billion people on the Internet. The bundling of services on the Internet into products ranging from soap to cars is what makes them competitive. Every company becomes a retail company. Every company will need to reach out to consumers directly and develop relationships with them, rather than selling only through retailers. No bank or credit card company is involved.
Money is numbers printed on bills.
Soon, money will be encrypted numbers printed on disk drives and digital wallets. Everybody becomes a bank. In the new economy, the concept of a manufacturing company morphs, too. Boeing becomes a design, networking, project management and marketing company working with suppliers and customers in e-business communities to design aircraft in cyberspace. The specifications are shared on the Internet with all relevant parties, and the plane is constructed on a network in concert by a new generation of workers.