Free Labour

Internet has opened up many new vistas for the companies to exploit, leverage or use the human resource. Now companies can get their work done for free or for free cheap rates. Forget about paying employees to do your company’s work—get somebody else to do it for you for free or for a very meager salary.

As every process or ideas has a name, this thing has acquired the name of ‘Crowd Sourcing’. Wired’s Paul Boutin defines it: “Crowd sourcing is the unofficial (but catchy) name of an IT-enabled business trend in which companies get unpaid or low-paid amateurs to design products, create content, even tackle corporate R&D problems in their spare time.”

Crowd sourcing is the most powerful driving force behind the open source software. Software like Linux, Apache, MySQL and host of others have benefited largely due to this approach. Crowd sourcing has worked pretty well with Linux and a few other software products—though it has hardly taken over the commercial software industry.

The major stumbling block for the companies is the valid fear of command and control and the lack of visibility. Companies are very tentative to turn to people who know nothing about the company, its process, its objectives, its passion and overall philosophy.

How could be an unknown outsider working for a company could be better than the employees who do talk with customers and suppliers every day about what they need to solve their business problems?