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10.08.07
How Choice Drives Change
 By Ross Mayfield
I've always believed that choice drives change. Or more specifically, that choices provided by free markets drive change in institutions towards more democratic systems.
Perhaps it is because of the system I grew up in, but even Chinese Market-Leninism (as opposed to Marxist-Leninism), the odds of a third way are small. Maybe one day I will unlearn this.
Take for example, what is happening in the enterprise when confronted with the abundance of choice afforded by the freer market of networked consumer and open source. This isn't just the fact that employees can choose their own IT solutions, putting policy aside, because of open source if you have the technical wherewithal, or hosted offerings if you've focused on other things. These are the things most CIOs are aware of, but they aren't worrying about their jobs. They are worried about the implicative decision about whether to be a host or not. If it is a public facing Web 2.0 community, they can be a host to it and exhibit influence. If it is intranet collaboration they can be a host to it and even have control, with a healthy check and balance against it.
But it is the second order effects of choice in the consumer market that create significant arbitrage conditions for enterprises. New models arise, with foreign concepts like share control to create value. It isn't the fact that you can host or not, but what can happen if you don't host it. In a very clear example, Radiohead is not only solely distributing their new album over the net, but enabling consumers to choose their own price.
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Choose your own price.
If you work in any intellectual property driven industry, you better think about that for a moment. It may reflect the actual demand model you are about to deal with. As the Net Gens become the dominant demographic in the market, they are more influenced by their peers than institutions, and know if they can't get what they want from institutions they will do it themselves.
In software, we are close to this model, at least in making the choice binary. At Socialtext, you choose if you want to pay, or do it yourself with open source.
Letting businesses choose their own price is a far way away, although I believe inevitable, as we transition to a gift economy, because of the institutionalized irrational selfishness of the corporate individual (feel free to disregard this sentence). But it is very real for consumer markets. Information not only wants to be free, so to does the decisions it informs, which is how information creates value.
Continue reading this article
About
the Author:
Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.
He also writes Ross Mayfield's Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.
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