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More important, the cost of marketing and acquiring customers has also fallen dramatically, allowing small and medium-sized businesses to compete with the multinationals.

Not long ago, this would have been impossible. Advertising in national papers or on TV was out of their reach. Local adverts in Yellow Pages or regional papers only brought local business. Specialist magazines, by their nature, only had small readerships.

The internet, and search engines in particular, has changed the rules of the game. With more than 1 billion people online, any business can now find its target market if it offers what people are searching for. And online advertising is more cost-effective than some of the traditional forms of attracting customers.

What does this mean for bigger companies? First, consumers want to engage with their brands online. If they are not open to engagement then others will step into their shoes. If they have a strong online platform, though, then they can build their brand and generate sales.

For instance, many supermarkets now find their biggest store is their website. Tesco has more than 1m online customers, and internet sales account for close to 5% of the company’s profits. Marks & Spencer has hinted it may start selling groceries online for the first time.

Second, engagement with customers online is measurable — measuring advertising spend has always been an imprecise science — but technology allows firms and their advertising agencies to measure when and how their online consumers interact with their brand. Chief executives can determine where their marketing budget is spent and precisely how many times people engaged with it.

I am optimistic about this future. There are too many examples of companies big and small, new and established, that are generating new wealth from this economic revolution to be otherwise. If anything, the pace of this change will become faster each year, creating unprecedented opportunity on a scale unimagined just a few years ago. The Sunday Times will be full of new entrepreneurs for many years to come.

However, to succeed companies need to understand that the rules of the game have been rewritten. The internet is a great democratiser, allowing anyone with a bright idea and a business plan to create a product or service and sell it worldwide. The premium will be speed and response to consumer demand.

- Nikesh Arora is Google’s president for Europe, Middle East and Africa

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