TECHNOLOGY and business are inextricably linked. Entrepreneurs harness technological advances and, with skill and luck, turn them into profitable products. Technology, in turn, changes how firms operate: electricity enabled the creation of larger, more efficient factories, since these no longer needed to depend on a central source of steam power; email has done away with most letters.

But new technologies also affect business in a subtler, more profound way. They alter not just how companies do things but also what they do – and, critically, what they don’t do.

The history of capitalism is a story of such reorganisations. The Industrial Revolution put paid to the “putting-out system”, in which companies obtained raw materials but outsourced manufacturing to self-employed craftsmen who converted these into finished products at home and were paid by output.