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| The inter-Not in year 2015
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| The internet is changing the world??? This is a fallacy just like the Y2K bug
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| Effect on the quality of life
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| The internet is a tool that has helped the sharing of information, but the grunt of work is still done by humans. The processor speed has increased to 50 gigahertz per second and most PCs have over 1000 gigabytes of memory. Although there are significant advancements in technology, the average work week has actually increased to 50 hours. With the capital expenditure in newer computer platforms, companies are expecting more from their employees to compensate for the large outflow of money.
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| Technology, such as PDAs and Blackberrys, are returned to the companies since executive were having difficulty drawing the line between work and home. Being able to answer emails immediately did not seem worth the loss of personal time and privacy. The stress of receiving emails during dinner time and on vacations had increased work-related depression.
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| The expectations of the wide spread changes that the internet would bring did not materialize because
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| - The economy taking to long to come out of the recession that started at the turn of the century did not supply enough cash flow to facilitate the R&D into technology. Investors grow weary of the variability in the returns of the growth stocks, such as computer hardware and application developer, leading to a shift of capital to more stable industries such as utilities and consumer goods. This has a domino effect on the demand for this specialized labor who loss work and try to redistribute into other fields
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| - Large corporations faced pressure for outsourcing services to lower wage countries and the privacy risk of the emerging countries caused political intervention to make shift work abroad more difficult, not to mention the evaporation of the skilled labor force in China and India.
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| - Limitations of software – algorithms that is used in most programming language reached their borders. Computer applications are not able to deal with the complexity to solve the problems that require human adaptability. Some characteristics are not able to convert into a variable that can be defined such as time and situation circumstances, much of the grey area that mangers have to use their judgment.
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| - Companies reduce the employee access to the internet after analyzing the personal use during business hours and realize that productivity is significantly hampered by this constant distraction. Although the product availability is vast in 2015, consumers prefer not to use their personal time to searching for products, which has disappointing results for online retailers.
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| - Tensions that rise due to the European Union to reduce differences to promote strength, mainly through the use of the Euro currency, has negative effects on the issue of globalization. The lose of cultural identity become major area of debate because a
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| E-Business
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| The number of purchases conducted on the web has significantly decreased due to the high amounts of unauthorized transactions. Credit cards companies that initially protected customers for transactions that the goods were not received or not as expected. But due to the high costs of this form of insurance, customers are left to use their own discretion when buying products online.
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| Another thing that has been growing at a nice pace for the last ten years, but without the extremes everyone seemed to expect back in 2005, is internet transactions. Both consumers and businesses have indeed increased their spending on goods through the internet; the total B2B e-commerce market is now at almost $4 trillion, while the consumer market has reached almost $500 billion.
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| This growth has come mostly from the increase in so-called web services, where applications are able to communicate directly with each other in areas such as inventory control, security checks and travel services. In short, these systems act as chains of interlinked services, such that if one system triggers an event to another system via an XML message, the receiving system treats the trigger according to its own rules. For instance, when Dell’s inventory levels of XRAM chips run below the re-order point, Dell’s SAP system orders a new shipment of chips from Samsung’s Taipei II plant automatically, and a report is made by a similar XML call to the Mozilla mail server.
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| The main reasons the growth has not been stronger, as it was expected to reach this level ten years ago by optimists in the early 2000’s, has mainly been security concerns and the social needs for interaction, especially in the B2C market. The security concerns were the main reason Microsoft lost its grip on the web browser software back in 2006, when Mozilla Firefox took over as the dominant browser. With a stronger focus on security, Firefox, originally released in 2004 as open-source software, gave users a solution to their fear of being cheated when buying goods on the internet. Firefox’s three-way verification and escrow service (in co-operation with PayPal) proved a very solid solution to most security issues regarding misuse of credit information.
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| The social need for interaction has however acted as a balancing loop in the trend of increasing e-commerce. It has become more and more evident that human beings have a need for interaction also when it comes to e-commerce. Long believed to be negligible in importance, scientists were amazed to discover that the need to see, feel and negotiate products in real life was strong also with the younger generations. An issue that was raised by labor unions, job preservation through real life interaction was also a hot topic a few years back. However, it seems the social interaction patterns themselves were stronger than these arguments.
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| Another reason that was oft mentioned together with the two above ones, the issue of transparency and comparison between different offers has increasingly been solved by such software as Google’s PriceFinder. The PriceFinder allows the user to use Google’s familiar search language to make expression for searching the internet for similar offers and create a report with recommendations. Initially flawed, the recommendations are now reported to be of high quality, and users seem to enjoy using it.
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