I was again reading and reviewing Lawrence Lessig's work tonight. The man is so very articulate and his observations so compelling. If you haven't become a student of his work, please take my advice and give it a try here.
At the 2002 Open Source Convention Lessig challenged the audience to get involved in the political process. A tireless advocate for open source, Lessig shared some basic concepts that are a solution to most of the barriers preventing our soceity from overcoming the major challenges of the time. A complete transcript of Lawrence's keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002 is available here. In summation his logical findings were as follows.
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
Ours is less and less a free society.
Watch the video from Big Thinkers wherein Lessig explains his views on freedom our culture and creativity.
I had an interesting exchange with a very reputable business associate yesterday, during which the topic of "ownership" came up as central to his business objectives. We all understand the notion, dedicate yourself to a company, build it up for years and then perhaps sell it for a premium value as you sail away into the sunset. As I woke this morning having thought about the prior days chat, another friend, Rasmus Elmann Ingerslev, had recommended a video on socialnomics that I watched, shown below. I am uncertain if most really understand what socialnomics signifies, as I've concluded its only the beginning of a far larger trend with greater implications beyond those of my facebook account. Similarly I am unclear if most business owners understand what the value of something really is and how these trends will impact it. Hence this post.
What socialnomics represents is the first wave in a series of approaching changes brought on by technology, which will deconstruct numerous and long standing economic paradigms including, among others, distribution, value creation and value exchange. How ? Because social technologies decentralize everything by empowering choice through the ubiquity of information. Social media is but the beginning of a series of tools that will provide users complete control over what is authentic, valuable and meaningful to them, thus obfuscating centralization in any and all systems. This is the essence of "socialnomics": economic rules redefined via new "social media", I call it technological, tools.
How economics are redefined by socialnomics is very simple. In the past people created wealth largely through one basic principal - they had information others did not and exploited that information to their benefit at the cost of others. These information disparities could last for extended periods and therefore organizations could be sustained for periods of time wherein an advantage existed. In the new economics this will become increasingly difficult because of the ubiquity of information. In "free markets" margins are driven towards zero. Therefore, value will have to be created in new ways, largely via increasingly short term creations of unique solutions. Thus value will be driven increasingly by what customers choose - not in how they are exploited by sustained information disparities or anomalies: a concept shared by the like of Toffler, Anderson and others.
The implications to organizations are enormous because competitive advantages will be increasingly fleeting. In Fung and Wind's book Competing in a Flat World, the notion of value and network organizations is craft fully set out, particularly how organizations must reengineer to become valuable. I've posted on the matter previously. In the old paradigm you could create something of value, build a fence around it and get someone to covet it enough to purchase it. In the new world, the platform is the value, change is too rapid to maintain an extended advantage and in the end your value is only that which your customers deem you deserve. With increasingly lower barriers to entry and free information too many alternatives are available. Think about it, who "owns" Google ? Truthfully, its customers do. If tomorrow everyone stopped using Google its "value" would be zero. Socialnomics reflects a free market in the purest sense and therefore, I ponder if many in business have grasped that fact when they imagine their sailing away into the sunset as a result of something they've built over years. That, I think, will becoming an increasingly rare occurrence.
"Only by getting people to "Shop different" will Apple get people to "Think different" . . . and ultimately, to Buy different", that was the comment shared by David Lang a number of years ago and he was some what correct. Despite possible channel conflicts and other challenges, Apple's is becoming a retail powerhouse, unveiling another 50 stores this year in 8 countries around the world including the new Manhattan location on the left - watch the video on abc news here and from the WSJ below. Impressive to say the least.
According to an article at MacCentral, Apple concluded that "'destination' locations such as Best Buy and Office Depot won't work for the 95 percent of non-Mac computer users." In doing so they realized the need to create "experiences" via retail space that engages consumers to understand unique attributes of their products and brand to grow market share. In this case bricks and mortar distribution is a synergistic strategy that serves to educate consumers in a unique way. This strategy integrates physical retail into a largely digital distribution model. When considering how other concept retailers like the "Discovery Store" or Sharper Image were unable to make this work, we'll see how sustainable Apple's strategy for retail will be in the long-term. Regardless, when visiting these new locations - they certainly are all about the customer.
Here is my initial thought: are you kidding me ? David's theory is that the adoption of Cloud Computing would be far more "acceptable" (aka politically correct) if we didn't have executives like Unisys's Richard Marcello saying: "We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization."
To be fair, I think David is a really brite guy and he correctly observes that technology innovation often sets forth unrealistic expectations when it comes to realizing cost reductions and other benefits. But to read this: "The message here is that the cloud computing industry needs to think a bit about what it's saying in the promotion of cloud computing. Some of the "cloud computing experts" are sending wrong and inaccurate messages. In other words, they're not helping." What are they not helping ? Don't you believe that enhancing the quality of systems and reducing the expense of deploying them for the benefit of customers isn't at the core of innovation ? Isn't that what its all about ? For those who don't think so I suggest a view of Danny Devito's Larry the liquidator speech from the movie Other People's Money below. Amen, you just heard a prayer - the prayer for the "dead".
Bottom line is significant segments of IT, along with players in a variety of industries, are in peril because their value paradigms are erroding, no longer as relevant to the market. Its only a matter of time until a combination of forces including globalism, technology advancements and mega cultural shifts turn over their proverbial apple carts. David do you honestly believe that the "press" people get around the "truth" (being that reengineering significant aspects of business models via cloud computing will eliminate vast segments of the job market and redeploy them abroad) will stop this revolution ? That's analogous to what GM thought ten years ago about its industry. You get the idea. Perhaps it would help advance our industry to be more transparent about obsolesence, change, and continuing to get an increasing share of a shrinking market. Think about the buggy whip example Larry cites in his speech.
Gartner's recent 2009 Symposium provided another opportunity for IT leaders to share views regarding the future. Google's chief Eric Schmidt explored his thinking on key internet trends; among them real time search, the dominance of Chinese language content, the ten fold increase in computing power and the continued shift to video content - all forecasted to dominate the next five years of the Internet's evolution.
Gartner is a respected research firm and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed at business leaders. An excerpted 6 minutes highlights points of interest to anyone impacted by the web.
For an interesting review of Schmidt's contemplation of these points read Kirkpatrick's article and watch the brief video. It will be an exciting next five years indeed.
I was again reading and reviewing Lawrence Lessig's work tonight. The man is so very articulate and his observations so compelling. If you haven't become a student of his work, please take my advice and give it a try here.
