The age of information technology and the Internet is changing the very nature of businesses. Not in the sense that we all recognise - changing the ways in which businesses function, and the relationships they have with their suppliers, partners and customers. But in the very significant, albeit easily overlooked sense of changing the whole social fabric in which businesses are created. In crucial ways, the high technology industry is shredding apart old-style entrepreneurial values and replacing them with a quick-buck sensibility in which the creators of an enterprise seem to feel they have almost no intrinsic personal investment of self and soul in their company.
It used to be that the great driving force behind the creation of a business was a personal vision to build an enterprise that recognised a gap in the market, fulfilled a need, did something better, or introduced a new widget or service and created a demand for it. Sure, making money was part of the overall vision, but so, usually, was a sense of self-fulfilment and achievement and - if the company thrived - a pride in having created and nurtured it.
Running a financially healthy and successful business and, with luck and talent, carefully and continually expanding it was the ultimate goal of the entrepreneur.
In contrast, technology companies, and especially Internet companies, are often - too often - born out of the goal of raking in as much venture capital as can be squeezed from the range of VCs, banks and others who offer developmental cash, and then selling the company on as quickly as possible and at as high a price as possible.
Of course, selling and acquiring companies is a key part of the business environment in any industry, but in the high-tech world, it's taken to an extreme - an extreme that may be irrevocably redefining how and why ventures are funded and changing, perhaps demolishing, the concept of "company values" or even a company personality.
That's because, in the hyperspeed world of the Internet, companies rarely have time to acquire a personality, much less values, before the founders sell it on to the Yahoos, Microsofts, AOLs and Amazons all hungrily looking for acquisitions. Creating a company with the sole purpose of selling it on as quickly as possible is now the entrepreneurial dream.
Given that small start-up Internet companies can quickly acquire valuations of tens and hundreds of millions - even billions - of pounds, and given that those valuations usually are all on paper and are given meaning only with a buy-out, no wonder the fledgling entrepreneur chooses the Internet rather than designing plumbing fixtures when looking for a quick ascent into millionairedom.
But this feverish buy-and-sell approach to company-making is creating an industry which increasingly never seems to look further ahead than the nearest date on which the initial public offering can be set. Business plans no longer have a mid or long-term component because peering any further down the road than 12 months seems almost pointless - hopefully, the company will have been sold to Microsoft by then, after all.
That shallowness of vision is already translating into a self-referential and self-reverential industry that focuses purely on personal profit and reward, not on investment in community, the arts, or any of the traditional charitable values that companies tend to develop as they broaden and deepen and anchor themselves in a particular location.
The technology industry in the United States is already widely recognised as one of the stingiest in charitable terms, even while being famously generous to its own employees, who must be lured in a sellers' job market with offers of company gyms, lavish in-house restaurants, spectacular company parties, and of course, endless free soft drinks and snacks.
In addition, when smaller companies endlessly disappear into larger ones, the business world becomes closed in and closed off, increasingly less accessible and at times, less accountable. It's easy for the interweave between business and community to begin to unravel.
What does all this mean for the future of business? In the current environment, it's distressingly easy to imagine a bleak future in which the technology world becomes a place of distant and unresponsive giants that feed on a diet of smaller companies.
But that dreary image can be balanced against the endless stream of fresh intelligence and energy exuded by so many young, new technology companies.
With innovation and capability one might also hope for greater responsiveness and - as the Net world in particular becomes more defined and stable and less subject to wild hype - a deeper commitment to company and community from the creators of this brash new industry.
Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie
