Tapscott edited this collection of Harvard Business Review articles and related pieces on doing business in networked markets, published in 1999 as a companion to his other work of the period.
The contributions cover the economics of information goods, disintermediation and re-intermediation, virtual organisations and outsourcing, the effect of networks on customer relationships, electronic commerce strategy, and the management of knowledge as an asset. Contributors include established management writers of the period.
The durable arguments in this literature concern the economics of goods with near-zero marginal cost, the effect of falling coordination costs on firm boundaries, and the shift of bargaining power toward customers who can compare offerings cheaply. Those have held up. The specific predictions about which companies and technologies would prevail, and the general expectation that established firms would be displaced rapidly, largely did not.
The reference has not verified the specific contents and contributors of this volume. It is a period collection assembled at the height of the first internet boom and should be read as a record of what informed opinion held at that moment rather than as current analysis. Shapiro and Varian's Information Rules, published in 1998, covers the same economics with analytical rigour and remains the standard reference. Readers should use that instead unless they specifically want the period document.
Readers interested in a 1999 period document, with Information Rules as the substantive source on network and information economics.
Canadian business author and consultant, co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute, who wrote The Digital Economy and Wikinomics.
The Digital Economy set out early how networks would redraw firm boundaries, and Wikinomics documented mass collaboration - open source, peer production, crowdsourced research - as a working production model rather than a curiosity. Blockchain Revolution extends the argument to distributed ledgers and their business applications.
Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.