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Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Hardcover)
Authors: Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
Amazon info

For those of you who haven't heard of the term "wiki", it is basically an easily editable web page - rather than a traditional read-only web page or blog. Wikis are often used for collaboration and were designed to be quick and easy to use - hence the term "wiki" which is Hawaiian for quick.

Overall, I found Wikinomics to be too one-sided, simplistic, and most importantly overly "hypey" with relatively weak advice for business people. But it does present a reasonable overview of the landscape and can be profitably skimmed by those looking to catch up on the latest in collaboration tools and mindsets.

Since I read this for my wife, I have provided a far more detailed writeup than usual.

Chapter 1 - Wikinomics - Describes how, in March 2000, Rod McEwen the CEO of an old-school gold mining company created the Goldcorp Challenge and enlisted the help of scientists world wide to get 8 million ounces of gold out of his mines - previously thought to be dry. This collaboration led to a complete transformation of the company, sent the stock soaring, and the rest is history (I am trying to emulate the breathless tone of the book). Why McEwen is no longer the CEO or whether the participating scientists felt justly compensated is not explained. Much of the rest of the chapter is devoted to generalized statements of how the world is changing and that "mass collaboration" will have a huge impact on just about everything, but it also includes the four principles of Wikinomics: Being Open, Sharing, Peering, Acting Globally. The general idea is that if you realize that there is more talent outside your organization than inside (always true) then the only way to tap that talent is to be as transparent as possible (being open), allowing the talent to be independent and self-organizing (peering), providing them with all the information and IP that you can (sharing), and collaborating without respect to borders/biases (acting globally).

Chapter 2 - The Perfect Storm - Here is where we get the "economics" part of Wikinomics. The authors claim that three trends are coming together to create "The Perfect Storm" for mass collaboration. First we have the "progammable web" - the authors claim that we can now "program the web" through the APIs, web services, and publishing tools. Well, I am not so sure. I think I can program the web, but I don't think that applies generally - unless you consider posting a comment on a blog as "programming". Second, we have "Coase's Theorem" - which states that as the costs of getting work done outside the organization decline (the costs of finding someone, of contracting, and of monitoring the work) more work should move outside the organizational boundaries. I agree that the internet does start to lower these costs (although contracting is pretty stubborn), but this has been going on since 2000, it is not something that is happening suddenly. Third, we have the coming of age of "Net generation" - the people born between 1977 and 1996, born to the web, comfortable with computers, suspicious of hierarchy, fond of collaborating. Others have referred to this group as GenY, Millenials, or the Internet generation (at least according to my quick look at wikipedia). I don't see much difference between the NetGen and techies of my generation, but I agree with much of the general premise - these folks view the computer and the network as an essential aspect of their social world (as do I, I can't imagine being without a computer and a network connection). My complaint here is that the emergence of people who see the internet as a social/collaborative space has been ongoing for years, if not decades. I don't see any particular critical tipping point having occurred in terms of actual collaboration that is applicable to general businesses. That having been said, I don't think any business should ignore the potential of collaboration technologies, as those technologies are reasonably mature, I just wouldn't state it as "breathlessly" as the authors.

Chapter 3 - Peer Pioneers - The stories of Linux and Wikipedia. Linux is indeed the pioneer in open source development and exemplifies pretty much all the principles of mass collaboration. Started by Linus Torvalds, operating pretty much independently of any profit motive, sharing the development on a worldwide basis to create a widely used product. A true success story. However, it is not without controversy - little of which is covered in the book. First, as the only open source game in town, it was far easier to attract a large number of coders; no other project has ever reached the scale of Linux. Second, Linux had a built-in "enemy" - Microsoft - which is quite a motivating factor for many developers, making it easier to attract people to give their most valuable resource (time) to the project. Third (and this is mentioned) - Linux is not a complete "peer" structure. Linus and a small group of people decide what goes in and what stays out. But all in all, Linux is a big win - but I don't see it as very repeatable for any future software project, there are just too many options now. Chapter 2 also covers wikipedia, which shares with Linux the ability to break a huge project into pieces that can be processed in parallel, e.g. 100,000 people can each write articles. Wikipedia is less successful than Linux with a number of controversies - accuracy of information, biases, and editing wars. But it is a good example of how a huge project can be done by "volunteers" - especially if you can tap into everyone's "I want to be an expert on something" urge. I enjoy using wikipedia, but to be honest, I would use Encyclopedia Brittanica - if it were only free.

Chapter 4 - Ideagoras - As in "Idea Agoras" (Idea marketplaces). Presents the story of InnoCentive and Yet2. InnoCentive is a place where you can state your problem, offer your reward, and get the answers. A few success stories are shared and this clearly works best when you can isolate and outsource a well defined "nugget" of a problem that can't easily be traced back to your overall product. And the challenge, IMHO, is coming up with nuggets of this type that can be solved just by smart thinkers (e.g. no big lab required, no extensive design/testing). Good idea, but again, I think it was a bit overhyped. Yet2 also handles the other side - a marketplace for solutions in search of problems, or monetizing IP and patents. The P&G case study presented here is one of the strongest in the book - how they have dedicated themselves to find ideas outside the company and how well they have done so far (e.g. Swiffer was something they found outside). Obviously the challenges are huge, from getting past NIH syndrome, to getting researches to spend time integrating someone else's stuff rather than building their own, to making sure the outside stuff really works, and lots of contractual issues. This chapter begins to exhibit one of the recurring weaknesses of the book - the advice to businesses is not very actionable. For example, this chapter covers the question of "what is the right ratio of internal/external research" - but it doesn't answer the question - just providing what comes down to "it depends" (but not specifying on "what" it depends).

Chapter 5 - The Prosumers - As in "consumers that produce". This should be no surprise to anyone who has played a computer game in the last 5 years or so - they all come with the ability to "roll your own world" (e.g. WorldBuilder in the Civilization series). As the authors state, this goes beyond mere personalization or customization, it allows you to create modifications (mods) that can be made available to all. This applies hugely to the music/video business where people make mashups (e.g. collages) of existing sources. The premise being that companies should look to their customers are co-creators of content. Some case studies here are Lego Mindstorms, Second Life, iPod, and Prius. But I think the book again overestimates/hypes the reality. All the above products have mods/hacks available, but the percentage of customers using the hacks is small and the percentage creating the hacks is obviously much smaller. Yes, we have downloaded programs for Mindstorms, played in Second Life, and found a website to learn how to turn off the annoying beep in the Prius - but I know that I am an unusual demographic. How many people do you know that are running podZilla on their ipod? This chapter seems rather obvious - in general, it is a good idea to provide an open platform for your product - especially if it is likely to generate a community. What isn't answered are questions like: When is it a good idea to follow Apple and remain closed? or What are the characteristics of products that are likely to generate a community? For example, there is a strong Mindstorms community, but for Ajax cleaner - not so much.

Chapter 6 - The New Alexandrians - As in "The Library at Alexandria" which was amazingly complete. This chapter covers the sharing of science, and of course covers the Human Genome project. I got a little lost in the details of the consortium around genes vs. the genome project itself, but the point that the chapter makes (and here it does offer some useful business advice) is that companies should open source/share basic research and then seek to be proprietary on the applications. So work with everyone to get the genome mapped and the genes identified, but they create your own proprietary drugs. Leveraging universities (natural locations for research, whereas companies are natural locations for products) is stressed, but the question of what ratio to have between public foundations and private enterprise is not well analyzed outside of generalities.

Chapter 7 - Platforms for Participation - This chapter is related to Chapter 5, but with more of a programming orientation. Prosumers can create new artwork by combining videos and music or roll out a game mod by changing XML files, but it takes a programmer to build a website using Amazon's or Google's toolkits (I look forward to experimenting with Google's Web Toolkit one day). Google maps is presented as a classic example - but strangely Zillow is not discussed - and I think Zillow is the best of the Google mashups. In this chapter I learned about RefundPlease (a service that checks on Amazon price drops for you) and ScanZoom (allows you to take a picture of a bar code on your camera phone, then get Amazon price comparisons based on the UPC code - it sounds awesome). Both these are built on the Amazon platform. Undoubtedly these platforms are cool, but are they likely to change the world of business anytime soon? Amazon and Google are giants with a tremendous base - their success is hard to emulate. This chapter also touches on the issue of compensation - which I think is a very tricky issue and this book would have benefited from a more thorough discussion. Open source works great when no one makes any money. Everyone is doing it out of love and everyone feels good. But as soon as ANYONE starts making money, problems develop and the problems are in proportion to the money earned. Thus, in a certain sense, the success is self-limiting (unless it is run by geeks who don't care about the money and don't make much - as with the guy who ran the Apache project). How to share the pie - how to measure contribution and perception of contribution - these issues can quickly kill the community spirit. But these are mostly my thoughts, this topic was not thoroughly delved.

Chapter 8 - The Global Plant Floor - This chapter starts with a discussion of the virtual fab lab (send the design, have it built for you and sent to you), but mostly focuses on Chinese motorcycles, Boeings 787 plane, and assembly of BMWs. This chapter struck me as a weak point and not particularly well integrated. My view was that the 787 is mostly possible because of the software that allowed the design work and testing to be done completely online, not because of a new mass collaboration paradigm. The other examples showed collaboration between vendors and partners, but it didn't appear earth-shattering to me. And the recommendations for businesses again continued to be lackluster and vague.

Chapter 9 - The Wiki Workplace - This has my favorite case study. The CEO of the Geek Squad starts a wiki for his company, but no one uses it (no surprise there - one topic not covered is how everyone wants to see everyone else's information, but no one has time to contribute their own - a huge problem with intranets (another topic not covered)). So one day the CEO tells a staff member that he is concerned about the employees in a far flung location remaining connected, as they are not using the wiki. The staff member tells him that he talks to those people all the time, eventually revealing that they all play Battlefield 2 online together. Having personally seen the bonding that occurs when workmates play online games against a shared opponent, I was thrilled to see this concept mentioned in print - although we had hoped to publish our story first :). The point of this story is that effective collaboration nearly always arises from the bottom up - and it may arise in a number of forms. Other examples include tagging and social networking. Yes, these collaborative elements will emerge in the workplace and they do need to be supported by management. And to its credit, this chapter does say that change will be slow.

Chapter 10 - Collaborative Minds - This is a summary chapter, but it also includes a section on the style of leadership that is necessary to succeed in a world where Being Open, Sharing, Peering and Acting Globally are key. And this is where I got a sense of Eric Schmidt's strength at Google - he does understand the engineering mindset (which is very similar to the NetGen mindset) and empowers people. But I didn't find the design principles that helpful and one "Take your time to get the structures and governance right" just seemed a bit out of character for most of the collaborations I have heard of (e.g. did Linus do that in the early days, I don't think so).

Chapter 11 - The Wikinomics Playbook - The "edit this book" section - just one sentence encouraging the reader to edit the book on the wiki. This book is #278 on the Amazon best seller list. Meaning how many thousands of buyers? Ten thousand, twenty thousand??? Number of edits on the wiki - 122. I don't quite think The Perfect Storm has arrived.