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 NAME                      DATE              DESCRIPTION
 
 Articles                  -                 select published works
 
    New York Times         -                 -
 
       Working It Out      Jun 11 2000       The company where everybody's a temp.
 
 
 
The New York Times Magazine (July 11, 2000)
 
Tech 2010: #28 
Working It Out: The Company Where Everybody's a Temp 
 
By David Pescovitz  
 
A company in Valencia, Calif., called 3D Systems makes a startlingly futuristic
contraption that might best be described as a three-dimensional fax machine.
Instead of spitting out a mere piece of paper, it produces an actual object. A
ThermoJet office printer, working from a digital blueprint, squirts out precise
drops of hot plastic to make the proper shape. The resulting object can be
anything, a blender, say, or a cell phone, and ready in just hours. Sadly, you
won't be able to make a milkshake with that blender or place a call on the
phone, but the 3-D fax machine is prized by companies that do a lot of
industrial design. It enables a group of people, spread out anywhere on the
planet, to collaborate in a way that only recently would have required them to
be in the same place.

There is nothing new, of course, about people working together from remote
locations. But the 3-D fax -- as well as devices like the holographic videophone
described on Page 90 -- is a machine that suggests a new stage in the
dismantling of the traditional company. With each technological leap, we move
closer to the reality of a truly virtual conglomerate that has no headquarters,
no shipping and warehouse departments, no infrastructure at all -- a company
that is no more than the sum of its ever changing human parts.

How will we get there from here? Michael Hammer, who runs his own management
education and research firm, is an evangelist of the virtual-company movement,
and he sees signs of it everywhere. One of his favorite case studies is the
network technology giant Cisco Systems. Cisco is essentially a research and
development company that happens to also have a powerful sales force. But what
is particularly interesting about Cisco is what it doesn't do. The Internet
routers the company sells are assembled by an independent manufacturer from
parts provided by a separate supplier. Another company oversees the whole
process, tracks inventory and ensures that the order is shipped to the customer.
It is getting to the point where products that Cisco sells may never be seen or
touched by an actual Cisco employee.

Back in 1992, an ex-Intel vice president named William Davidow was the co-author
of "The Virtual Corporation," in which he predicted that the flow of
electronic information would enable companies to completely decentralize
themselves. Most functions could be spun out on their own -- product
development, manufacturing, inventory management, sales and returns. At the
time, much of what he wrote was dismissed as hype and wishful thinking. Since
then, however, his venture capital firm, Mohr, Davidow Ventures, has made major
investments in companies like Agile Software and Datasweep that produce software
to help companies evolve into virtual entities.

"So much of what we see in the business-to-business Internet space is about
having the ability to coordinate relationships between different entities,"
Davidow says. "That's going to have tremendous impact. The Internet
dramatically reduces the cost of carrying on a lot of functions outside a
firm."

The model that business futurists like to hold up is the movie industry. When
you see a blockbuster at the multiplex, it says Sony or Paramount in big
letters, but that name tells you almost nothing about who actually made the
movie. In Hollywood, nearly everything is contracted out -- the casting, the
costumes, the craft services -- and when the movie is done, everybody disperses
to go work on whatever they've got lined up next. Many different kinds of goods
and services may end up being produced in the same manner.

"In the future, when I order something over the Web, the brand isn't going
to be as important as getting what I want," says Tom Sears, director of
product marketing for PTC, a maker of Internet software. "And that product
will actually be provided by a big group of companies who come together almost
in real time to get me what I need."

What this all means is that boundaries in the business world -- company to
company, company to employee, company to consumer -- will blur, especially when
machines like the 3-D printer trickle down to the consumer, which isn't so far
off. The same 3-D printer that cost $100,000 a few years ago is now half that
price, and in 10 years, it may go for less than $1,000. Meanwhile, a
three-dimensional printer developed at M.I.T. and manufactured by Z Corporation
is now able to produce objects in multiple colors, and researchers are working
on a more advanced machine that can fuse powdered material into actual working
components. Combine technologically evolved 3-D printers in the home with
high-bandwidth Internet connections, and the customer of a virtual corporation
could easily become a part of it.