Introduction
The main difference between conventional organization and virtual organization is based on their organizational arrangements and the nature of business itself. Conventional organizations represent well-established businesses with long history. Most of them use the Internet and online sites as a promotional tool only trying to reach wider target audience (Mowshowitz 2002). In contrast to conventional organizations, virtual businesses emerged with the development of the Internet and exist in virtual environment only. In new environment, conventional companies may have advantages that virtual ones lack.
First, because their contact with customers will mostly be channeled through the telephone, or increasingly e-mail, they will be able to record and keep track of their customer’s preferences and needs much more effectively than a company that communicates through different media. Second, conventional companies will be able to offer added value services, for instance by personalizing products or services that they sell based on the information gathered and manipulated through different media. The examples of conventional companies are Ford Motor Company and Toyota. The conventional language of their strategy makes consumers think of new product features, but these analogies may not always be the most appropriate in a new and hostile economic environment in which there is as much to be gained from working together as from fighting against each other (Child, 2005).
Conventional organizations
Virtual companies like Amazon, provide electronic commerce solutions seeing it as an activity that is information based. The Amazon does not rely on shared office accommodation, or even on achieving traditional economies of scale, but on being able to split the skills and experience of the participants (Mowshowitz 2002). Amazon also seems likely that the single most important of these assets will be information on buyers.
Knowing who Amazon’s customers are will allow virtual companies of this type to bypass traditional middle men and distribution channels; knowing what customers want — potentially on a personal basis — will enable virtual companies to develop new products and sell them effectively; knowing how they behave will allow consumers to link up to other organizations so that our joint offering is that much more persuasive (Merriman, 2007).
Discussion section
The other difference between two types of companies is that conventional companies have traditional office structure while virtual companies support only online communication. This method can be bad as well as good for consumers; although they have much more choice, they no longer have access to familiar benchmarks of whether the online sites are dealing with is reliable (an office, real employees and so on (Child 2005).
Though, for the start-up it is an ideal situation: it takes just days to be able to encourage an image on a par with an organization that has existed for decades. For all modern organizations, both conventional and virtual, the costs of setting up a website are so low that there is nothing to stop an person having a larger, more impressive site than a large corporation (certainly, this is often the case, as the latter find it difficult to reconfigure their conventional method to marketing to the more interactive environment of the Internet (Mowshowitz 2002).
Conclusion
In sum, both traditional businesses and newly emerged like Amazon use online sates and the Internet to attract more consumers and expend their businesses. Modern economy means that companies in the future are more probably going to be looking for ways to combine their internet information with others than looking to maintain the conventional barriers between industries.
Bibliography
Child, J. 2005, Organization: contemporary principles and practice. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Merriman, K. K. 2007, Profiling Virtual Employees: The Impact of Managing Virtually. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 14 (1), 44.
Mowshowitz, A. 2002, Virtual Organization: Toward a Theory of Societal Transformation Stimulated by Information Technology. Quorum Books.