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Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 2 / The Global Plant Floor with Don Tapscott

Troy Angrignon

• 3 min read

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]


The Global Plant Floor, by Don Tapscott, author of the new book Wikinomics

    • Just now publishing “wikinomics” – a new book about how mass collaboration changes everything
    • Available for pre-order now:
    • First chapter is available here

    • Carlotta Perez, historian, talks about all revolutions: excitement, bubble, bubble burst, actual deployment cycle. We’re now heading into the real period of the web finally.
    • This is the biggest change to company structures, competition, and the way companies create value that has happened in the past hundred years!
    • My company has done large $500M syndicated research projects to understand this stuff.
    • I have been studying web 2.0 for six years now.
    • Web 1.0: HTML; standard for presentation
    • Web 2.0: web services; multimedia, geospatial, mobility, integration, “the thing”; it is becoming a platform for application building in its own right but is not a presentation layer.
    • The act of putting stuff on the web is “programming” the machine.
    • Enterprise 2.0 is about the economics of collaboration:
    • Why do firms exist? Transaction costs; the cost of coordination to bring it all together to solve a problem. Otherwise, everything would be built by individuals. It’s cheaper to do things in the corporation than as a single person.
    • We moved from industrial age corporations to the extended enterprise, to the business webs (think of the IT global supply chain web) and moving to “mass collaboration” – this is MUCH more than crowd-sourcing or social networking. Social networking is becoming a new form of production. Self-organization  What used to take millenia or centuries can now happen in years, months, or overnight.
    • BMW’s X3 is built by Magna, a globally distributed group of manufacturers, not by BMW. This is about changing how BMW makes cars.
    • Goldcorp: published his proprietary geo-data on the web and held a competition for $500K to see who could find gold on the property they owned. For $500K investment, he found $3.4B worth of gold. His market cap went up to $10B. He had all sorts of crazy responses from geologists, mathematicians, etc. and got crazy solutions.
    • HOLY COW
    • He acted globally; he shared his private data; he changed the game.
  • Mass collaboration:
    • Question: Could you create something other than an operating system with open source? Answer from Linus Torvalds: I don’t think there’s anything you couldn’t create.
    • Red Hat: Linux; Spike source; open source applications are all good examples.
    • Zopa.com: peer lending is mass collaboration where people help other people build their businesses.
    • The California school board wants to open source and wikify all of their textbooks
    • Cambrian House lets a group of people come up with innovative ideas, grade those ideas, narrow the list to the best ideas, build those ideas, and then Cambrian House sells that widget for you and you as the contributor or team, profit from it. Click here to see how it works. [WOW. Bizarre concept. I wonder…how good will it be at manufacturing. Or selling/distribution?]
    • The Chinese motorcycle industry is an open source ecosystem
    • Ideagoras: cooperative markets innovating in business (see chart below)

    • Second Life: the REAL story is not that their currency is pegged to the USD but the product is entirely created by its customers (pro-sumer)
    • So you could pro-sume clothing, mindstorm robots,
    • Biotechs and pharmas could have owned gene patents but they collaborated instead.
    • Mashups ecosystems will be collaboratively built on a massive scale
    • IntelliOne: calculate the location of any cell phone over time (like watching traffic)
    • Boeing – the Dreamliner has no spec. Companies collaborate together, build chunks of the plane and those chunks are snapped together like LEGO. [I don’t buy that statement. You can’t build a wing or a fuselage or a nav system or anything else without a specification / blueprint, particularly not if the parts are going to fit together like LEGO. It will be interesting to see how Tapscott covers this in his book.]

    • Enterprise 2.0 is causing a crisis of leadership!  It is the single largest change in corporate structure and operation in the past century.

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