The web was introduced more than a decade a go in the daily life of businesses, and for all of this time managers are still coping to understand the economic implications of cheap information on and about their business.
Hal Varian, professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California at Berkeley, say’s “it’s imperative for managers to gain a keener understanding of the potential for technology to reconfigure their industries”. Mr. Varian also is serving at present as Google’s chief economist. He is comparing the current period with previews times of industrialization when new technologies combined to create ever more complex and valuable systems—and thus reshaped the economy.
The present period in which we are living, in my opinion and in others opinion too is called the “combinatorial innovation”, if you look historically you will finds periods in history were there would be the availability of a different component parts that innovators could combine or recombine to create new inventions. For example in the 1800’s it was interchangeable parts, in the 1920 it was electronic, in the 1970’s it was integrated circuits. In our period we have Internet Components, software, languages, protocols and the capability to combine these component parts in a way of creating new innovations. Also to mention that the current parts are bits which are even better for as today because we do not seam to run out of them, you can reproduce them, you can duplicate them, you can spread them around the world, and you can have tens of thousands of innovators combining them and recombining them to create new innovations. So there is no shortage on this. There are no inventory delays, so there is a situation were the components are available for everyone. This is why we have a tremendous burst of innovation that we are seeing.
What are other periods were we saw technology influence the way organizations work!, a great example is the telegraph and railroad had a great influence in the development of modern corporations. In this case you had to have a large organization to manage these technologies and you also had to have the communication and transportation infrastructure to enable the management at a distance.
So now, with what we are seeing in the mobility aspect of this industry, we are going to have a totally different concept of what it means to go to work. Today the work comes to us, and we are able to deal with work from anywhere, without any boundaries, using the infrastructure that is becoming available. When we are all networked we have access to the same documents, to the same capabilities, to this common infrastructure, and we can improve the way we work—intellectual work, knowledge work—flows through the organization. This will lead definitely to a more advanced term of productivity.
Back in the early day’s when we had copyrighted software which you could not distribute, which Microsoft still is back in the day’s, of do not distribute, newer companies like Google one of the bigger ones out their but they are many more these day’s, that are allowing redistribution of their products to all individuals, this is changing the scope of private property, so today anymore is not so much the question of what is owned or not owned, it’s a question of how can you leverage the assets you have to realize the most value.
In these models, there is typically a revenue generating component some were in the value chain, and this is most commonly seen in the advertising side. Today we have to look at the economy and say, “what is it that’s really scarce in the Internet economy?” and the answer is Attention. There is a saying that “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. So being able to capture some ones attention it is very valuable asset. Perhaps the most visible company who build around this business is Google, because they are capturing your attention each time you do a search, for something you are interested in. this is an ideal time to show you an advertisement for a product which might be related to what you are searching for complimentary to what you are searching all about.
The best job for the next 10 years will be those who are statisticians. The ability to take data understand it, process it, extract value from it, to visualize it, communicate it, this will be the biggest skill that many companies will be looking for, they will pay gold for it. Obviously this is a part of this they are other jobs that compliment the statistical side of the data. A couple of years in the passed we had all these people digesting lots of information so they can intern feed it to the top decision makers. But this is not the way it works now; the information can be available across the ranks, to everyone in the organization. We must ensure that the data is always available so people can make their day-to-day decisions. This empowers the knowledgeable worker to get better and more efficient in the present and future.
In one place were we will see a lot of changes will be in the traditional marketing industry. I believe the next step in advertising is offline advertising.
