Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams; $32.50 cloth 978-1-59184-138-8, Portfolio/Penguin, Jan.
Wikinomics is a thoroughly researched survey of 21st-century digital success stories that makes a compelling case for the transformative power of online collaboration. Readers desiring a critical approach, or those with a substantial degree of technical literacy, would be advised to look elsewhere, but Wikinomics is an ideal introduction to the principles that underpin the “new” New Economy, or for techies trying to evangelize senior management.

If the dot-com boom of the late 1990s spawned an entire library of business books, the current frenzy over what the technopundits refer to as “Web 2.0” is busily generating enough material to add at least a new wing to the collection. The breathless rhetoric of revolution and empowerment through technology is still front and centre in this new slew of titles, but the second generation of Web business books also has opportunities that the first round lacked. First, they have the advantage of a wider range of successful examples of online business models to draw from. Second, they can potentially take the ongoing successes and failures of globalization into account as part of their argument. Whether or not they rise to this challenge remains to be seen.

Web 2.0 is a term coined by publisher Tim O’Reilly a few years ago to describe a loose, baggy, and rapidly growing set of Internet technologies, companies, and services – e.g., BitTorrent, Flickr, YouTube, blogging, GNU/Linux, and yes, Wikis – that allow even those with little technical expertise to collaboratively create and manage the digital material that interests them.

Tapscott and Williams distill the successes of Web 2.0 down into a catechism of four principles (openness, peering, sharing, acting globally) and seven forms of collaborative production (the neologisms begin to fly thick and fast here: “ideagoras,” “prosumers,” and “New Alexandrians” are just the beginning). Taken together, they argue, these principles are causing deep structural changes in the shapes and strategies of successful businesses, and even in the economy itself. At a time when one Web 2.0 business (Google) can buy another (YouTube) for $1.65-billion, and the power of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer system is such that it now represents more than a third of all traffic on the Internet (much of it pirated content, though that could change), it’s difficult to disagree.

Meanwhile, entire sectors of the “old” economy, dominated by multinational conglomerates, such as the music and film industry, which rely on artificial scarcity instead of sharing and plenitude for their profits, are worried enough that they’re waging open war against the online newcomers. One of my students wears a T-shirt that reads, “Your failed business model is not my problem.” Tapscott and Williams concur, proclaiming on the book’s penultimate page: “For the business manager the number-one lesson is that the monolithic, self-contained inwardly focused corporation is dead.”

However, this is not a particularly new insight. Variants of it appear in several of Tapscott’s other 10 books, and it is part of the core argument of the bible of the dot-com business boom, The Cluetrain Manifesto, which decreed that if markets were really conversations, then conventional corporations would have to give consumers the greater role in the conversation that they’ve been demanding.

All of which leads to a salient point: though it flirts with the language of social change, Wikinomics is, at its core, a business book. Make no mistake: if there’s a revolution being described in these pages, it’s about the overthrow of one type of business by another. The more troubling aspects of the relationship between Internet economics and globalization pass without comment, let alone critique, despite the potentially genuine subversiveness and/or moments of real complicity and compromise that characterize the protean world of Web 2.0 technologies. (Despite Google’s ostensible altruism, for example, the company has profited tidily from its complicity with the Chinese government’s local censorship policies.)

As long as you aren’t looking for the next No Logo or Empire, though, Wikinomics has much to offer. As an executive summary of what business principles work well online right now, it may be without peer. Tapscott and Williams have built an accompanying Wiki for the book on their website, offering the refreshing possibility that, rather than lapsing into the datedness that is the usual fate of digital punditry, these ideas may continue to evolve by leveraging the very collective resources that the book describes.