Kai Ryssdal!

I feel like our car radio's are always tuned to one of two radio stations: 97.3 KBCO or NPR (KUNC in Colorado). While I usually prefer to listen to my own music when driving, I sometimes find myself tuning in NPR's Marketplace while driving home from work. Its certainly a lot better than those yaps on Alice screaming at each other and at callers....

On Monday, Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace (its spelled Kai, Lisa) was interviewing Nicholas Carr, who had some interesting job-related statistics I wanted to remember (they already came in handy to make a point to one of my clients):

There's a new breed of Internet company on the loose. They grow like weeds, serve millions of customers a day and operate globally. And they have very, very few employees.

Look at YouTube, the video network. When it was bought by Google in 2006, for more than $1 billion, it was one of the most popular and fastest growing sites on the Net, broadcasting more than 100 million clips a day. Yet it employed a grand total of 60 people. Compare that to a traditional TV network like CBS, which has more than 23,000 employees.

Or look at Skype, the Internet telephone company. When eBay acquired it, also in 2006, it had already signed up 53 million users -- more than twice the number of phone customers served by venerable British Telecom. Yet Skype employed just 200 people, about 90,000 fewer than British Telecom had in the United Kingdom alone.

One last example: Craigslist, the online classified-ad site. By the end of 2006 it was serving up 5 billion pages to 10 million visitors every month. Yet it was being run by just 22 people.

These companies can grow so large with so few employees because they're built almost entirely of software code running on the Net.

The full article is here: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/01/14/carr_commentary/

I'd say I'm a very heavy user of the newest technologies out there that allow us to communicate better with others, get better information, become more organized, etc. I have to wonder what tools out there right now (or ones that are just being developed) are going to be as disruptive as YouTube, Skype or Craigslist? What will be the next industry to change? What jobs might become obsolete in the future as certain business functions become more automated? What job profession will be sustainable enough to take me to retirement?