Friday, February 12, 2016

The digital revolution

I was just looking at some information on Netflix. It has sales of about 5.5 billion dollar a year with a net income of $300-400 million, but it only has about 2200 employees. How can a company with such a large amount of sales only have 2200 employees? It has so few employees because it outsources as much as possible. I was just reading today that Netflix has finally closed down Its last date center. It now has outsourced all its data to Amazon (which is actually ironic since they are competitors). So not only does Netflix have very few employees, it doesn't even own the servers that its data is on. Talk about radical outsourcing! This is a key feature of the digital age we are living in. You can now create a company that earns billions of dollars a year with very few employees. I would dare to say that you can literally create a multi-million dollar company all by yourself. Is that truly possible? I believe it is so.

I think this is one aspect of the digital revolution that is a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because well, you can create a multi-million dollar company all by yourself. The curse is, if you are not the owner, who will you be working for? The digital revolution is offering great opportunity to those who are capable of starting their own companies. But, it is a curse to those who will need to find jobs. Why? Because there will not be enough of them. The next couple of decades are going to be very interesting.

What do you think?

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