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Ford Australia's Falcon and General Motors Holden's Commodore are icons representing two things about Australia that go far beyond just their place in the automotive industry.

They embody the depth and breadth of Australia's indigenous design, engineering and manufacturing skills base.

And they demonstrate the corporate isolation of the Great Southern Land.

The Falcon in particular continues as an oddity in the world of modern manufacturing. Few models of cars in the world today remain so distinctly custom built for a single, small market.

The determination of the "industry of industries" (see related article The Industry of Industries Goes Back to the Future) to establish itself in Australia in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s created the impetus for the growth and maturation of much of Australia's industrial base.

But as the world's economy has globalised since the 1970s, corporations have been forced to find ways to manage themselves across borders, from the highest strategic planning levels to low levels of day to day operations.

At a time when corporations in Australia needed to integrate themselves into international business systems, geographic isolation has all too often left them out of the centre of the loop when the head offices of the nation's industrial leaders have set about re-inventing themselves.

In the past few years, the information revolution has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, communications have so transformed people's expectations of what is possible that it is hard to recall how difficult international communications once were. The speed at which the Internet is reinventing the business world is such that even the people inventing the products of the future are having trouble keeping up. (see related article An Audience with Greg Papadopolous)

But on the other hand, the mega-programs that corporations have installed to build internal communications systems – the big Enterprise Resources Planning software programs – have created a kind of corporate digital divide. So expensive have they been to buy and so troublesome to install that they have been out of the reach of many of Australia's small and medium sized businesses. Often, it is an edict from overseas head offices that has resulted in those massive information technology systems to be installed – designed to link together processes across business divisions, from procurement to marketing.

The patronage of Ford and GMH over the decades in Australia seeded hundreds of smaller local businesses that survived because of their ability to work physically closely with their large customers. Fat software designed to streamline such business relationships can, paradoxically, undermine them because they were often not built with small companies in mind.

But with ERP software having fallen out of favour and a new Internet-based paradigm for doing business emerging in the form of e-markets (see related article E-markets and the Virtual Bazaar), events on the technological front have turned in a direction that could be very much in Australian industry's favour.

E-markets, online bazaars where businesses do everything from trade excess inventory to collaborate on the design of new products and components, are still embryonic. But the enthusiasm for the concept can be gauged by estimates that there will be literally hundreds of the new markets operating by the end of this year.

The difference between e-markets and ERP programs is as profound as the difference between the Internet and the personal computer. ERP is a device that allows information to be collated, organised and created. E-markets is a broad communication platform.

And that defines the opportunity for Australian businesses. Part of the motivation for large companies to become involved in e-markets is that it opens the procurement door to suppliers who might never have been heard of, let alone considered, in the past.

Of course, all of the usual "real world" issues remain, including delivery, security of supply and international credit. But the promise of a truly electronic market place at least extends the ability to know when a contract to supply a component is available for bidding to anyone in the world who has access to an Internet browser.

The reality, however, is likely to fall short of commercial utopia for small and medium sized Australian companies. Personal relationships will continue to be the foundation of business relationships in large contracts. Historical performance will continue to count highly for companies deciding who to do business with, particularly as the Internet allows manufacturers to move closer to true just-in-time manufacturing and build to order (see related article Ford Takes Aim at the Future). Businesses in commodity markets competing purely on the basis of price will find they are in a market of near perfect information (see related article The Frictionless Economy) where profits tend to zero, according to economic theory.

Nonetheless, opportunities exist today that did not exist yesterday, and yet more will exist tomorrow.

But the liberation of information challenges not only inter-corporate relationships. It ultimately challenges corporate structures themselves. (see related article The Frictionless Economy)

To date, investor excitement has focused on the e-marketplaces created by or devoted to the trading needs of big corporations'. But, now alongside them are a plethora of e-markets to allow individuals to trade their skills.

eLance, Guru.com, eWork Exchange and FreeAgent.com are sites where services such as designing, writing, software programming and web design are traded on a project by project, individual seller to individual buyer basis, where the buyer is often a corporate entity. These businesses often present themselves as the eBay of the service markets.

Already, eLance claims individuals have begun to come together to form ad hoc teams to bid for more complicated projects. Notably, freelancers bidding for work on these sites are based around the globe. One profile of eLance reported an Argentinean web designer as saying he was making more from freelance work through eLance than through his full time job.

Again, this is a phenomenon that offers a glimpse of the possibilities of an economy where information can be transmitted with little or no resistance, creating challenges to traditional ideas of corporate organisations that could only be dreamed of in the past (see related article The Frictionless Economy).

Service industries lend themselves more readily to a structure based on loose associations between skills and service providers than does manufacturing. This in turn offers intriguing new opportunities for Australia as service economy.

Australia's education system is regarded as one of the nation's strongest competitive assets, but most often in the context of attracting or retaining international investment.

But what if the education system did not create the feedstock for larger companies, but individual, international freelance businesses? Theory, and now practice, is beginning to suggest that a disaggregated model of economic organisation is possible and desirable in the Internet Age. Nationally, that could prove a partial solution to the perceived problem of the national brain drain of skilled workers.

Australia's political and corporate leadership has long acknowledged education as an arm of a non-discriminatory industry policy. The opportunities emerging to turn this asset into a direct contributor to national income have implications for further policies, notably universal access to high bandwidth connectivity to the Internet (see related article Bandwidth: An Industry Policy Issue) and the related issue of regional development.

Regional development in Australia has always meant direct investment by the public sector in country and regional towns or some form of subsidy to draw the private sector into these areas.

But Australia has also always enjoyed relatively high quality education facilities across the country, even to tertiary levels in some parts of the country. Yet the perennial problem of rural populations being deprived of their best and brightest youth as soon as they reach working age seems only to be getting worse.

Presently, those who have fled the bush to further their careers typically have little choice but to wait until they have reached the end of their working lives to return. The Internet promises an opportunity for people who have established their skills and are at the peak of their earning power to consider another option, without foregoing the opportunity to seek and win work from the cities or even other countries.

Whether this potential will ever become commonplace we will not know for some time yet. But there is one certainty. If governments do not ensure that universal access to bandwidth is made available to all Australians, there will simply never be an opportunity for the Internet to be used as an Information Age regional development tool.