Time and Time Zones

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TIME AND TIME ZONES

On the surface, the concept of time may seem relatively simple and straightforward. Anyone who interacts with other individuals or organizations relies heavily on time to manage daily activities. People constantly complain that they don't have enough of it and continually save it, waste it, and try to find more of it. Without clocks, time frames, and time zones, the fabric of organization and structure that holds the world together would quickly unravel. If the world did not share a similar definition of time, coordinating activities and making arrangements (such as the delivery of goods) would become extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Webster's College Dictionary defines time as "the system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another." Time corresponds to measurable real-world phenomena. For example, the movement of the Earth around the Sun signifies one year, one revolution of the Earth around its axis signifies one day, and so on. However, because it can only be defined through measurement, time is not absolute according to Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity. To confuse matters further, some scientists disagree as to whether time itself really exists.

U.S. cities relied on the Sun to set time until the late 19th century. At that time, the railroad industry spearheaded the development of time zones to prevent train collisions and to better manage their schedules. Because of factory production schedules, the Industrial Revolution also made it important for the public to have access to more precise time measurements, which allowed them to show up for work at specific points in time. Standard Time was developed in 1884 to create uniform time standard across the globe. This led to the creation of 24 different international time zones. In theory, these regions are spaced longitudinally at 15 degrees, causing time to vary by one hour in each successive zone from a meridian running through Greenwich, England. This is the basis of Universal Time or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Based on political factors and other issues, the exact points at which time zones end and begin can vary in certain areas of the world.

INTERNET TIME

With the advent of the Internet and e-commerce came the concept of Internet Time, which generally referred to the breakneck speed at which things happened on the Internet, including success, failure, new product development, funding from venture capitalists, initial public offerings (IPOs), and the desire to get rich quick. It refers to the frantic rush many dot.com companies felt, especially during the late 1990s. InformationWeek writer Chris Murphy dubbed Internet Time as "a volatile mix of extraordinary opportunity, irrational exuberance, and blind panic," and explained that Internet Time transformed business into a sporting event where the goal was to finish first before time ran off the clock. Seeming to confirm Einstein's claim that time frames are not absolute, some compared Internet time to dog years, claiming that things like product development cycles unfolded faster on the Internet than in the "real" world. This was attributed to a variety of different factors, including the speed of data transmission and computer processors.

The concept that being the first company to introduce a product or service to the marketplace would guarantee success, even if the introduction were premature due to poor development, was associated with Internet Time. Although some e-companies, including Amazon.com and Yahoo, achieved success by being first, such an action was not a guarantee for success. In the early 2000s, many dot.com companies failed and saw their stock values plummet. Successful executives recognized that a sound business model and flexible, scalable technology also were critical components for staying in business, not just being the first-to-market.

In Technology Review, Andrew Odlyzko, head of mathematics and cryptography research at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J., argued that Internet Time was a myth, and that the Internet's impact on the world, while important, happened according to the same time frames as other inventions and developments throughout history. Odlyzko explained that predictions about how the Internet would quickly revolutionize different aspects of the world and render things like phone companies and classified ads obsolete had yet to occur by the early 2000s. "As a general historical rule, it takes about a decade for even the most compelling new product or service to be widely accepted," he said. "That's still true. Even such attractive technologies as music CDs and cell phones, which many of us now regard as indispensable, took more than 10 years to move from commercial introduction to widespread use. Today we are seeing similar rates of adoption for DVDs, as well as digital cable TV, personal digital assistants and other emerging technologies."

TECHNICAL TIMING

Besides the perception that time unfolded more quickly on the Internet, the technical aspect of time measurement and synchronization was important to e-commerce companies in the early 2000s. This was due to a growing reliance on the accurate movement of data across the many networks that comprise the Internet. When data is sent over the Internet, it travels in packets and passes through a variety of different devices during transmission, including computers, servers, and routers. In the early 2000s, Symmetricom, which was formed through a merger between Telecom Solutions and Hewlett-Packard's timing division, was a leading provider of synchronization equipment for networks. The company used "atomic clocks, quartz, and GPS technologies to time over 21,000 nodes, or central offices, in more than 1,000 telecommunications networks in over 70 countries around the globe."

E-COMMERCE AND TIME ZONES

The advent of e-commerce led to a variety of issues corresponding to doing business in multiple time zones. Some of these presented opportunities for criminals to engage in malicious business practices. As Europe's Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) explained, "occasions will inevitably occur in e-commerce when goods are not owned by anyone (either inadvertently or deliberately) presenting opportunities for chaos and crime. Alternatively, goods may at the same time be owned by two parties. How many times in a minute could someone online sell a piece of software or intellectual property? Who would be responsible? Whose insurance/legal jurisdiction would apply?"

During e-commerce, positive and negative issues also arise involving intra-time-zone communication. This applies to business-to-business interactions, those between consumers and companies, and even virtual teams of employees who must communicate with one another over great distances. When the differences between time zones are great, people may be asleep in one zone while counterparts are working in another. Depending on the geographic differences involved, real-time communication via phone or satellite-or Web-based video conferencing is often limited to small windows of several hours.

Communicating between distant time zones often leads to asynchronous communication patterns in which people exchange messages via e-mail or electronic bulletin boards. On one hand, this can cause communication delays, and various date and time stamping issues can make it a challenge for people to sequentially piece together chains of correspondence should they need to do so. However, virtual teams communicating in this manner also are able to increase productivity by working around-the-clock. This is accomplished by passing the workload around—such as between London, San Francisco, and Hong Kong—every 24 hours.

With the growth in virtual teams and virtual offices, which consist of work groups whose members are geographically distributed, the role of time zones was an important one in the early 2000s. According to Time, a 2000 PricewaterhouseCoopers study involving 82 large multinational firms revealed that, although the majority still relied heavily on relocation, nearly one quarter permitted employees based at home to manage international operations. Many of the companies expected to adopt virtual approaches. One company that relied heavily on remote communication was Popeyes Chicken, the world's second-largest quick-service chicken restaurant chain. In 2001 Popeyes operated restaurants in 41 states and 17 foreign countries. Its employees were able to effectively deal with issues like chicken supply shortages in Alaska and the opening of new restaurants in remote locations like Iceland from the company's Atlanta headquarters.

TIME ZONE SOLUTIONS

By the early 2000s, several solutions to time zone issues had been proposed. They attempted to make the issue of time less confusing by creating one universal time for the entire world. This had benefits for e-commerce companies in the areas of delivery agreements, online transactions, customer service, and more. In January 2000, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced an initiative led by Europe's IMRG to create Greenwich Electronic Time (GeT). Like GMT, GeT was based on the meridian running through Greenwich, England and relied on the worldwide network of atomic clocks responsible for keeping precise time. Swiss watchmaker Swatch also began making watches that displayed what it coined Internet time. Instead of dividing every day into 1,440 minutes, Swatch's concept divided days into 1,000 beats. Unlike GMT, Internet time was based on a meridian running through Biel, Switzerland, the home of Swatch's headquarters.

Finally, AppSense Technologies Ltd. was a company addressing the technical side of time zone issues in the early 2000s. It provided a solution for application service providers (ASPs) and companies who served users on distributed computer systems throughout the world. Its TimePortal supported multiple time zones, making it possible for users to see their local time on the desktop, instead of the system time of the remote server to which they were connected. The software allowed this through a simple drop-down menu that enabled distributed users to select their local time and save it in the form of a profile that was effective each time the user logged on. If necessary, time zones could be adjusted as users traveled between different time zones.