Business and Technology
Business and Technology
I firmly believe that technology does not only have a bearing on national and international business, but technology and business are strongly inter related. One grows with the other, and necessitates a realization of an unique concept of the holy union of business and technology, which I would like to call “biztech”. In the following article I will try to establish this idea.
The first thing that might strike a bit odd to my readers is the use of the word “holy”. Let me clarify why I chose this word before some holy people raise an eyebrow(pun was unintentional!!). The word holy means spiritually whole or sound; dedicated to a religious purpose . This union of technology and business although man made, we throughout the entire human evolution had no idea how we are shaping up something of such magnitude which not only dictate the way we earn our living, but also how we live our life. Although its materialistic in nature, but still there is some wholesomeness to this idea which makes it have an uncanny resemblance to spirituality, so earthly yet so heavenly. Its religious purpose is to serve mankind. Well I would not like my readers to delve into the philosophy of this article straight away, which I shall certainly reintroduce at the end. So without further adieu, lets dive into the sea of original purpose!
The moment we come across the term “business”, the first thing that flashes in our inner eye are bundles of cash. Money gives us the power to buy what we need, what we want, what we cant live without. But, lets dig a bit deeper, what was going on in this world before the advent of cash, or money in the standard form?
We had the barter system, hence the ancestor of monetary system is the barter system.
Bartering is a medium in which goods or services are directly exchanged for other goods and/or services without a common unit of exchange(without the use of money). A farmer could exchange his produce for the fish obtained by a fisherman or the cloth produced by a weaver. So farmer produced his crops using own methods, the fisherman caught his fishes using his own methods, again the weaver weaved clothes in his own method.
Now, if the farmer didnt have the method to farm, he wouldnt be able to exchange his product for anything else. The same can be said about the weaver and the fisherman. Now, this method which is unique to each of these people can be called technology. So we see that technology had a hand to play even at the very nascent form of business.
Lets move forward in time and witness how unknowingly man had used both technology and business in unison.
Soon man found out that barter system had its convoluted drawbacks. Dickering over the relative value of different things tends to be time-consuming and troublesome, and so societies tended to converge towards a common medium of exchange. Aztecs used cacao beans, the main ingredient of chocolate, though it seems a bit unlikely that this was the origin of the modern term of “bean-counter” for an accountant; livestock was common among herding cultures; slaves were sometimes used, too, but they were much harder to control than cattle and so not as popular; and many cultures used salt, including the Romans for a time, leading to the modern term “salary”. The use of salt and cacao beans(main ingredient of chocolate) points towards the development of technology. Thus making it necessary account for it in business as well.
The medium that gradually gained widespread acceptance was precious metals such as gold and silver. Ancient Egypt was one of the first lands to establish transactions using precious metals, though their forms were variable — rings, bars, wafers, and so on. Coins are said to have been invented by the Lydians, a people of Asia Minor, sometime after 640 BC, using stamped ingots of “electrum”, a naturally occurring amalgam of silver and gold. The scheme was refined by King Croesus, ruler of Lydia from 560 to 546 BC, who introduced coins of true gold. He became identified with wealth in the antique expression “rich as Croesus”.
Introduction of coinage was a great boost to commerce, simplifying transactions and allowing them to be conducted more rationally over long distances. The Greeks picked up the idea of coins from the Lydians; since the Greeks had a colonial and trading empire that ringed the Mediterranean, they spread their coinage, such as the “stater” and various multiples of the “drachma”, along all the shores of the sea. When Alexander the Great engaged in a campaign of conquest in the 4th century BC that took him to the borders of India, he kept his troops loyal by paying them in coin, and also helped spread the idea further.
I need to mention to my