There is a major redesign in the world of business: digital platforms like Amazon and Facebook are increasingly hiring people at a pace few would have expected. Amazon employs about 1 million people in the United States; Walmart remains the private sector leader at 1.6 million workers. No one would have predicted this trajectory for a web company like Amazon during the fledgling era of digital commerce.
But as maturity comes, it does seem like internet companies can actually create huge jobs. There is a reason for that: if you scale digital products via improved unit economics and better marginal costs, you need more workers to unite the bytes with atoms. Those atoms are the meatspace because humans still live in the real space of it. So, expect this evolution of more workers to happen in the next coming years as that convergence of bytes and atoms enters the next phase.
Facebook is dropping big numbers for the European Union (EU): “So today, we’re announcing a plan to create 10,000 new high-skilled jobs within the European Union (EU) over the next five years. ” Those will work on the metaverse, possibly a new domain for the internet.
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Someone should remind Facebook that Africa needs its own thousands also! And be concerned if Facebook becomes the “creator” of the “metaverse internet”; they could put “tax” on it unlike the current one which evolved out of public labs!
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Transitioning from small company to a big one here remains a challenge, what we normally do is to start divesting once we feel we have grown, evolving into something bigger and super is not a thing we have mastered here yet.
But for the tech behemoths, there are so many interest groups they must keep happy, from regulators to customers, from partners to rivals, so they are condemned to keep innovating and shifting the goalposts, to guarantee survival.
Africa is not yet putting Facebook under pressure, if she does, Facebook will come up with a package to make her smile, just like it’s pacifying the EU. Since the EU cannot create big companies but still need to fund its welfare states, the money needs to be coming from somewhere, and many of the punch bags must be American.