Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything was pretty much a disappointment. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it bad. I was just hoping for a less history and a more speculation. Unfortunately, if you’ve been paying a moderate amount of attention to the internet/ social software/ business world for the past few years, you won’t find much new information.
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams have done a good job of rounding up the big trends, their so-called Principles of Wikinomics: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. Much of the work is a sort of biography of these paradigms and the companies & products that embody them. You probably know their names: Linux, Wikipedia, Google, Flickr, IBM, BMW, Best Buy, etc.
Each chapter reviews a new trend, fleshes out the history and summarizes by way of canned, italicized guidelines for business. I wish I hadn’t returned the book to the library already or I’d quote a few. Anyway, they also mix in a few Trendwatching-like neologisms, like “Ideagoras” and “New Alexandrians”. By far the most intriguing part of the book was Chapter 9, discussing the “wiki workplace.” Perhaps that’s because the idea is still the most nebulous and little-tested: “We are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm” That’ll be an interesting process to see over the next few years. I think free agent/ consultant/ collaborative culture will become more and more popular.
Mark Larson 