June 2008 | By Enrique Dans, Professor at IE Business School
The web is now 15 years old, and, just like any adolescent, it has revolutionized the previous generation. Business organizations need to find new approaches to keep growing in lockstep with the continuous changes the web brings.
The web celebrates its 15th birthday. Fifteen years have passed since Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau decided, at the CERN, to change the world by making their operating source codes freely available everyone, unleashing one of the most important technological diffusion processes of our time and giving rise to one of the development platforms with the greatest potential in the history of technology. Now, after 15 years of using the web, of seeing it grow and reach adolescence, it is a good moment to consider the future: that of the web, our future and that of our business.
If anything is patently obvious, it is that after 15 years of existence the web has become one of the greatest friction-reducers ever made available to humankind. Entering a search engine such as Google, keying in anything and pressing a button produces a page of results in a fraction of a second, when, before the advent of the web, it would have taken us hours, almost certainly after a number of trips and much detailed documentation and summarizing. And, as classic economics says, friction is a very important part of business.
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