Times They Are a Changing
August 1st, 2010 2 Comments » RSS 2.0 Pingback
I had signed up to the idea before I bought the book but, even so, Wikinomics written by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, is a fascinating read. They suggest that the new culture of mass collaboration will re-order the power base of the world, and as large a claim as it, I actually believe them.
It is all underpinned by the way in which technology now allows individuals to communicate to each other en-mass, not just one or two at a time like a telephone conversation, or like a dozen people at a meeting for example. The result is that people organise themselves into massive communities with considerable power, enough to undermine the gargantuan corporate companies that have assimilated tremendous power in recent decades. Thank god is all I can say! - if you’ve ever seen the Pixar film Wal-E then you can probably see where all that was heading!
There are examples of how the power base is shifting already: In the record industry peer to peer sharing transformed the industry, recorded companies like Sony, Time Warner and EMI were brought to their knees because millions of people decided to work together, and in the process the power shifted from the corporate, to the listener and the musician. Wikipedia has revolutionised publishing, and Opensource software projects like Linux or WordPress (this website is a WordPress website hosted on Linux servers) are both taking lumps out of the corporate giants like Microsoft and Apple. And this is really just the start of it…
November 7th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
A good counter-point and caveat to the enthusiasm I too feel for this book is offered by John Thackara;
http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2008/01/wikinomics_vs_g.php
November 9th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
That’s interesting yeh. In some ways Oil will be the toughest industry to crack. But then it might do a good job of KO-ing itself. I mean just like the financial economy surely the greedy few will look after their own pockets before considering the long term interests of the industry (or the world for that matter).
I’ve also been told that there’s another book on the open source / mass collaboration phenomenon – ‘Here comes everybody’.