Virtual Factory

‘What is the difference between virtual business and e-business?’ quipped my son as I was reading the morning paper. Peering over my reading glasses I tried to doge a frontal incident by saying, ‘Isn’t this what you should know as a Computer student under the topic of E-commerce?’ ‘With the lay persons using the terms inter-changeably, now even I am getting confused’ he answered.  I mused, now the Banks on the Internet were called E-Banks weren’t they? Or were they called virtual Banks? Now even I was confused. So I sat up and tried to dissect the term along with satisfying my curiosity as to why my son brought up the topic in the first place.

Let me see, the games that one played where they had a lot of graphics and you wore specs/goggles so that you saw virtual worlds which you entered! AH ha, so fictitious worlds were virtual worlds. But wait a minute. In my last systems audit, the client had used less servers by balancing load between servers by a solution called ‘virtualisation’ and believe me that was very much real and not a fiction as I saw the benefits and what went into it. So I had two interpretations of virtual – real and not real. This put me very much back in square 1 of the game.

My son broke my chain of thoughts ‘Do virtual businesses deliver real solid cash or goods?’ I had an answer for this, ‘On your last birthday did we not shop in the virtual electronic market and order a digital camera for you?’

Now came the bomb based on the news of the day ‘If virtual shops deliver solid goods, then why can’t virtual factories deliver solid chocolates?’ he asked innocently. I had read the news so I could clear some points is what I wrongly thought. ‘It is a matter of tax holiday based on a real factory and not virtual’ I cleared the point. ‘But’ he pestered, ‘what difference does it make if new factory is running there or old? They did come earlier to the improvement of infrastructure’. While I paused, his younger brain clicked at a higher clock speed as it connected dots in the past to an event known as ‘Satyam’.  He recalled that in that case only the sales and whole lot of employees were imaginary which would be called as ‘virtual’ today. But in the present case, a whole factory was fictitious. That gave higher potential of whole gamut of capital and revenue expenses and even sales revenue to be just a figment of imagination.  ‘If the number of manipulated records becomes the criteria, is this case bigger than Satyam?’ he asked. I was not a record keeper of such sorts so I expressed ignorance. But I did remember a news item where the jailor wanted to run a business earning income for the Jail by involving the Satyam kingpin. So I could now explain that ‘Perhaps the same jailor made ex-chairman of Satyam give consultancy to Cadbury so the record if any still belongs to Satyam’.

Meanwhile, I mused, if there is a virtual company will they have to appoint a virtual auditor and if so, how will he be paid? Virtually?