Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006)

Import 11_28_09

Interesting in some parts, with some new ideas. Unfortunately it lacked some thorough editing to remove several repetitions of some concepts that get reinstated time and time again.
Could be a good tool to explain web 2.0 / collaboration to someon with no experience of it, for people familiar with the current "web 2.0" situation there are some nuggets, but most information will taste stale. ( )

A must read in any business person's library. The game is changing and this has a lot of great ideas on spurring innovation in a collaborative environment. ( )

I've read Barabási's (Linked) and Merchant's (New How) books before this one so most ideas were already known, but Tapscott's approach was a bit closer to what I was looking or wanted to hear about. These three books could easily be sold together. Maybe there are others but I think these ones interlock together just fine. The world is changing, how we do business is changing, how we relate with each other is changing too. We must, at least, be aware of these changes, furthermore if we want to continue doing business. We must change or re-shape all our out-dated concepts and for that we must know and understand what the heck is happening! Even those out-dated examples! If they could do it, why can't we? A. look at what we've got; B. just look at what we want; C. how's the best way to get from A to B? Nobody said we can't... ( )

Wikinomics is all about taking the business model of Wikipedia and expanding it to marketable products, service lines, and companies. Published in 2008, it's surprising how dated some of the examples seem today (My Space? Friendster? Delicious?) It does go to show how fickle the public can be, today's billion dollar baby is the butt of tomorrow's joke. Examples aside, Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is all about the benefits of open source; putting ideas into the public domain; and receiving highly qualified input from contributors throughout the world. Tapscott lauds corporations that embrace this new paradigm; and vilifies those who cling too tightly to the seemingly out-dated concepts of intellectual property. A few mega-corps are targets of his scorn: Apple and Sony among them. And a few are heralded as leaders in this new world, among them IBM.

The book is rife with examples on how some existing companies or product lines leverage the phenomenon of community development. For business folk looking a new, possibly profitable, direct, it can provide food for thought. However, it can just as easily spell doom for currently lucrative industries should their cash cow be served at the soup kitchen. Tapscott does not balance his book by suggesting this approach could spell doom for particular industries or product lines.

Tapscott also revisits the same examples over and over. This rather undermines the "all the cool kids are doing it" vibe he's trying to convey n the book. I think I would have enjoyed a shorter, tighter book that visits these corporate examples but once. After the second or third time, these examples feel recycled and whatever point Tapscott is trying to make is lost. Still, while I was already familiar with open-source software development (Linux was his model) and, of course, Wikipedia; it was kind of neat seeing how something not in the tech/IP realm: a gold mining company, leverages this model to find new veins to exploit. ( )