In the good old days, a company was considered BIG if they occupied spacious and well-furnished offices, owned their buildings complete with spacious parking lots, hired hundreds of employees and purchased expensive advertising slots in TV, Radio, Magazines and Newspapers. These companies are visible everywhere. Their corporate names are printed in capitalized bold letters in the phone books. Everyone – well, almost everyone -- are familiar with their names.

It’s a different story now.

In the virtual community, the small guys are giving the big boys a run for their money. With sheer guts and a few thousand dollars to start up, a lot of home-based entrepreneurs are making a killing day-in and day-out on the Internet. All done in the private confines of their little home-offices (very often called, kitchen, dining, garage, bedroom, den or whatever part of the house).

In the Internet, we small guys don’t have to fear the big guys. We can spend sleepless nights pouring all those tutorial books on HTML programming to create the site that will clobber those million-dollar creations to pieces.  If they cannot stand you, they can buy you out! And I am sure that you like that, as it will make you rich!

We small guys have more flexibility with our operations. We have more control. We can do what we want. In fact, although the big boys have the money to squander, they are incapable of doing what we small fries can do at a click of the “mouse”. For example, it will take five working days or maybe a week or more, for a big corporation to make a very simple change of a misspelled word on the website. If that mistake was observed at the time when the person in charge of the Internet was on three-month vacation leave, that error may have to stay there while the whole company suffers the degradation that a simple word brought about.

One thing we can observe in most websites of the big boys is that it remains the same almost forever (except for the news and media sites that need to be updated daily). Why? Because, nobody can change it on his own volition. Changes may have to pass the approval of the manager; sometimes even the board of directors or the chairman of the board. When a thing is approved, it then goes back down the corporate ladder following the same steps as when it went up. When the changes are made, new developments have happened and the change may not be needed anymore. Ironically, because of the internal squabble necessary to get things done, big corporations are not very enthusiastic about their presence on the Web.

We give due respect to the big boys because they really have impressive websites. They can afford to hire a $300.00 an hour Webmaster and a platoon of assistants to make them a small slick button.

As I said earlier, size doesn’t matter in the Internet. In fact, come to think of it, being small has its advantages. If you were working alone, all the decisions are yours. You make changes, you make your own design, you quote your own prices, you decide on everything—good or no good.

If you were working with your wife, you may have to disagree on some points but it is easier to make a decision. You don’t need glamorous “bull” sessions or so much brainstorming. As new ideas pump in, all you need is implement it. Try it. If it doesn’t work, kill it. Simple.

In the Internet, being big in the real world does not directly result to profitability and financial success.  In fact, most of the major dot.coms are so deep in the red. A small obscure dot.com who provides the product or service to his targeted market and who knows how to promote and market his/her website to this gigantic web world has all the chances equal to the well-oiled corporations.

Simply said, in the Internet, we can be as BIG as anyone else. That is of course, when you know how.