What It Means to be An
Internet Company – Part 1 (Page 4 of 6)

1. What It Means to be an Internet Company
2. Structural
3. Psychological
4. Organizational
5. Technological
6. What Does It All Mean?

Organizational

• Be horizontal, not hierarchal. A key benefit of using Internet technologies is that they allow you to create horizontal organizations. If you create a deep, hierarchal organization, you will be denuding one of the key values of the Internet as the great organization leveler. Also, the killer Internet application - email - should be allowed to flow freely through an organization.
  
  
• No Matter Where You Go, There You Are. The Internet can be leveraged as a communications medium and means. This lets companies disperse their teams over a wide area. Not everyone needs to be in the same physical location. The potential to disperse the effort across the globe is elemental to the Internet's impact on time. Internet companies need to be nearly virtual. This doesn't mean that they don't have specific physical space, but instead that they can perform the core functions of their businesses regardless of where the key team members are. A compelling case could be made that huge investments in physical infrastructure may not be optimal for Internet companies. Witness Microsoft and its strategy to acquire access to very large volumes of hosting capacity - the company has made investments in companies building and operating hosting facilities as opposed to investing in the facilities themselves.
  
  
• Scale by leveraging technology, not adding people. In the long term, using technology is cheaper than adding headcount. Integrate the Internet into your business such that you are able to grow the business by scaling the Internet infrastructure, adding people only when necessary and only to perform duties that cannot be performed via the Internet. Maximize the number of ways and places people can use the Internet to complete tasks and communicate with each other. There is often an indirect relationship between number of people in an Internet-oriented organization and its market capitalization.