It is pretty interesting to list everything internet-related (from VOIP to bill payments to search) and realize that we're in a period similar to the era in which electricity became a utility. In the early 20th century, electricity was still uncommon in many places; Lenin's slogan[1] in the 1920s was that "Communism = Soviet Power + Electrification of the whole country".
Paul David[2] is an economic historian who pointed out that factories were completely redesigned once people realized they didn't need to be centered on a steam engine:
Electric light bulbs were available by 1879, and there
were generating stations in New York and London by 1881.
Yet a thoughtful observer in 1900 would have found little
evidence that the "electricity revolution" was making
business more efficient.
Steam-powered manufacturing had linked an entire
production line to a single huge steam engine. As a
result, factories were stacked on many floors around the
central engine, with drive belts all running at the same
speed. The flow of work around the factory was governed by
the need to put certain machines close to the steam
engine, rather than the logic of moving the product from
one machine to the next. When electric dynamos were first
introduced, the steam engine would be ripped out and the
dynamo would replace it. Productivity barely improved.
Eventually, businesses figured out that factories could be
completely redesigned on a single floor. Production lines
were arranged to enable the smooth flow of materials
around the factory. Most importantly, each worker could
have his or her own little electric motor, starting it or
stopping it at will. The improvements weren't just
architectural but social: Once the technology allowed
workers to make more decisions, they needed more training
and different contracts to encourage them to take
responsibility.
We can probably do yet another iteration on factories once the existence of ubiquitous data fully sinks in. For one thing, machines can now know the states of other machines in the factory and optimize their production accordingly. I guess Honda's dark factories are the first version of this.
The overall phenomenon is really just Marc Andreessen's thesis[3] in another guise. Today, "Software is Eating the World", and software engineers + the internet are automating processes and arguably obsolescing many jobs. But if we warped back 80-90 years or so, we'd say that "Electricity is Eating the World", and electrical and mechanical engineers were the ones automating processes and obsolescing jobs.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO_plan
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_undercover_economist/...
[3] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...