Computer Technology’s Impact On Commerce & Trade
If one were to enter a debate about the invention which had the greatest impact on business, commerce and trade in the past 100 years, or even of all time, one would be hard pressed to choose even the printing press or the wheel as superior to that of the computer and computer technology. While all of them represents tools to use in helpful applications for commerce and trade, computer technology has more greatly expanded the potentials and possibilities for all aspects of trade and commerce in ways never before even imagined.
The span of this text is insignificant to do justice to such a topic, but if we even look at the changing nature of financial centers, which used to be large centers located in a place like London, we can see how dramatically computer technology has changed so many aspects of commerce and trade. 100 years ago America had more than 200 stock exchanges and different major cities fought for supremacy. New York ultimately won out as the chief financial center in America as London remained the chief financial center in Europe. The ticker tape and telegraph enabled this transformation from regional to national centers of finance. However, computer technology has dramatically returned the situation to something even more diverse than regional financial centers—local financial centers. Today, relatively new stock exchanges like NasDaq don’t really have a base location. Further, its online brokers like E*Trade can be accessed from any computer linked to the Internet. Financial markets used to bring together banks, brokers and investors but this is not true in today’s technology environment. The advanced technology has also become an incentive for parties who are in remote locations to do more trading with each other, an aspect of commerce also fueled by world payment systems that offer less risk than in the past.
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