The online version of BusinessWeek carries a recent interview of Howard Rheingold, the author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, about the "new economic system" he thinks it's emerging "from such seemingly disparate developments as Web logs, open-source software development, and Google." If you read the interview, you'll see that "Rheingold is worried that established companies could quash such nascent innovations as file-sharing." He also says that the Nokias and the HPs of our world should give prototypes of their gears to 15-year-olds to discover what these creative young people can do with them, instead on relying on marketing people. And if you haven't done it before, don't forget to visit the Smart Mobs Weblog and to read a previous interview of Rheingold about the US presidential election of 2004, "A Major Change in the Political Equation."
Here are selected excerpts of what Rheingold says. The first one is about the way we are using Google or Amazon.
Google is based on the emergent choices of people who link. Nobody is really thinking, "I'm now contributing to Google's page rank." What they're thinking is, "This link is something my readers would really be interested in." They're making an individual judgment that, in the aggregate, turns out to be a pretty good indicator of what's the best source.
Then you look at Amazon and its recommendation system, getting users to provide free reviews, users sharing choices with their friends, users who make lists of products. They get a lot of free advice that turns out to be very useful in the aggregate. There's also Wikipedia [the online encyclopedia written by volunteers]. It has 500,000 articles in 50 languages at virtually no cost, vs. Encyclopedia Britannica spending millions of dollars and they have 50,000 articles
Rheingold adds that these trends will produce a new economic system, but that lots of companies, especially in the media business, will resist changes. But if U.S. companies don't embrace disruptive technologies, other countries will do.
BusinessWeek also asked him where these new trends will happen.
We now have a world out there where billions of people have in their pockets technologies for innovation that far surpass what entire industries had just a couple decades ago. If you're talking about the communications industry, your innovation is happening with 15-year-old girls. That was where [Japanese cellular network provider NTT] DoCoMo won big. I think the total number of text messages sent is approaching 100 billion a month. Of course, the revenues on that are only a fraction of a cent each, but multiply a fraction of a cent by 100 billion, and it begins to add up to real money.
You're seeing that now with the picturephones. People are not using them the way it was predicted. They're using them to share their days: Here's a picture of somebody's haircut. Here's a picture of somebody's melon. Look at this shoe in a store. It wasn't determined by an expensive R&D lab. It was determined in practice by young people who appropriate these devices in unexpected ways. There's nothing more inventive than a 15-year-old.
I don't think that's going away. If I was a Nokia or a Hewlett-Packard, I would take a fraction of what I'm spending on those buildings full of expensive people and give out a whole bunch of prototypes to a whole bunch of 15-year-olds and have contracts with them where you can observe their behavior in an ethical way and enable them to suggest innovations, and give them some reasonable small reward for that. And once in a while, you're going to make a billion dollars off it.
Here is the last exchange in this interview.
Some folks in the U.S. are worried about the competition from overseas that comes from that dispersal of knowledge.
We should have thought about it when we sold all those computers and chips overseas. These aren't just widgets. These are the building blocks of innovation.
Do I need to add anything else?
Source: Robert D. Hof, BusinessWeek Online, August 11, 2004
6:55:41 PM
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