This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 01 Oct 2007, by eyal matsliah.
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02 Apr 11
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When the information economy was first launched several decades ago, the dream was to own and operate a proprietary system—one that no one else could copy—and then let the money roll in. To a degree that can still be done, at least for short period, if the system is significantly superior.
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But the network economy rewards the plentitude of open systems more than the scarcity of closed systems.
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The value of an invention, company, or technology increases exponentially as the number of systems it participates with increases linearly.
The law of plentitude is not about dominance. The self-interest of ordinary business guarantees that every company in the world will strive to get its product or service into every home, or into every store. Popularity is an ancient goal. But that is not what network plentitude strives for.
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A hammer is part of only a few networks, but a telephone is a part of many. The more networks a product or service can join, the more powerful it becomes
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Plentitude will soon reach the level of zillionics. We know from mathematics that systems containing very, very large numbers of parts behave significantly different from systems with fewer than a million parts. Zillionics is the state of supreme abundance, of parts in the many millions. The network economy promises zillions of parts, zillions of artifacts, zillions of documents, zillions of bots, zillions of network nodes, zillions of connections, and zillions of combinations. Zillionics is a realm much more at home in biology—where there have been zillions of genes and organisms for a long time—than in our recent manufactured world. Living systems know how to handle zillionics. Our own methods of dealing with zillionic plentitude will mimic biology.
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Touch as many nets as you can. Because the value of an action in the network economy multiplies exponentially by the number of networks that action flows through, you want to touch as many other networks as you can reach. This is plentitude. You want to maximize the number of relations flowing to and from you, or your service or product. Imagine your creation as being born inert, like a door nail off a factory conveyor belt. The job in the network economy is to link the nail to as many other systems as possible. You want to adapt it to the contractor system by making it a standard contractor size so that it fits into standard air-powered hammers. You want to give it a SKU designation so it can be handled by the retail sales network. It may want a bar code so it can be read by a laser-read checkout system. Eventually, you want it to incorporate a little bit of interacting silicon, so it can warn the door of breakage, and take part in the smart house network. For every additional system the nail is a part of, it gains in value. Best of all, the systems and all their members also gain in value from every nail that joins.
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And that’s just for a stick of iron. More complex objects and services are capable of permeating far more systems and networks, thus greatly boosting their own value and the plentiful value of all the systems they touch.
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uccess. If you run a hotel, what can you do to permit others—airlines, luggage retailers, tour guides—to be part of your network? Rather than viewing their dependency on your success as a form of parasitism, or worse, as a rip-off, understand this tight coupling as sustenance. You want to entice others to create services centered around the customer attention you have won, or to supply add-ons to your product, or even, if it is a new-fangled idea, to create legal imitations. This is a counter-intuitive stance at first, but it plays right into the logic of the net. A small piece of an expanding pie is the biggest piece of all. Software is especially primed to work this way. The programmers who created the hit game Doom deliberately made it easy to modify. The results: Hundreds of other gamers issued versions of Doom that were vastly better than the original, but that ran on the Doom system. Doom boomed and so did some of the derivatives. The software economy is full of such examples. Third-party templates for spreadsheets, word processors, and browsers make profits for both the third-party vendor and the host system. It takes only a bit of imagination to see how the leveraging of opportunities also works in domains outside of software. When confronted with a fork in the road, if all things are equal, go down the path that makes the opportunities of others plentiful.
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18 Dec 09
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Consider the first modern fax machine that rolled off the conveyor belt around 1965. Despite millions of dollars spent on its R&D, it was worth nothing. Zero. The second fax machine to be made immediately made the first one worth something. There was someone to fax to. Because fax machines are linked into a network, each additional fax machine that is shipped increases the value of all the fax machines operating before it.
This is called the fax effect. The fax effect dictates that plentitude generates value
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First hoary axiom: Value comes from scarcity
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Second hoary axiom: When things are made plentiful, they become devalued.
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commonness reduces value
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The logic of the network flips this industrial lesson upside down
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In a network economy, value is derived from plentitude
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It vastly expands the numbers of things, increases the numbers of intangibles with ease, multiplies the numbers of connections exponentially, and creates new opportunities without number.
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The network economy runs with plentitude
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01 Oct 07
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In the network economy, the more plentiful things become, the > more valuable they become. >
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The value > of an invention, company, or technology increases exponentially as the > number of systems it participates with increases linearly. >
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The more interconnected a technology is, the more > opportunities it spawns for both use and misuse. >
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The law of plentitude is > most accurately rendered thus: In a network, the more opportunities > that are taken, the faster new opportunities arise. >
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Maximize the opportunities of others. > In every aspect of your business (and personal life) try to allow > others to build their success around your own success. >
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