Does the Internet make place irrelevant?

I talked to a Fresno businessman recently who was in talks with someone in Vermont to build a Web site for his business.

"Why do you have to look to Vermont for that? Can't you find someone locally who can do the job just as well?"
His point was that the Internet has made place irrelevant -- we are no longer "limited" to shopping among local vendors to find what we need as far as goods or services.

Today, during an editorial board meeting with representatives of the Regional Jobs Initiative, a Fresno-area volunteer effort to create jobs, I was reminded of this previous conversation when Ashley Swearengin, the head of the RJI, said one of her group's goals is to get the Valley work force to the point "where they can compete on a national, or even global level, because anymore it's all the same."

That is an eye-opening way to look at how we need to go about addressing our region's problems. We can't just work on making things better here today than they were five, 10 or 20 years ago. We're not just competing with our own past record.

We need to think of solutions that put us on a level playing field with the global marketplace that is the world today.