Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Taps Don, Anthony D. Williams Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Book Review: A book of two halves
Summary: 3 Stars
How useful is the philosophy of the world-famous collaborative encyclopedia Wikiepedia when applied outside the world of reference books? Tapscott and Williams both answer and fail to answer this question. On the one hand, they offer the readers many examples of how one person has built up on another's work to produce something neither of them would have been able to achieve on their own.
But the reader can be left bewildered, wondering "what do all these have in common, other than being new and on the web?" This is a great pity, as the book promises in its brightest moments to offer new insights into business. But, sorry to say, specific examples are just too thin on the ground for it to be useful.
Still, it is a well written round up of collaborative, "wiki-style" projects.
Book Review: Humorously over the top
Summary: 2 Stars
The book takes what is, at times, a comically breathlessly enthusiastic view on how the future is being changed by a culture of mass collaboration, but I don't personally feel that the shift is quite so fundamental as is being indicated. On the whole, it's an entertaining read, but more for the concrete examples of mass collaboration in industry rather than the central thesis of the book, which is 'Hold on to your hats!'.
Some of the examples of mass collaboration cited as fundamental paradigm shifts strike me as incremental shifts at best - chief amongst these, the example of GoldCorp who opened up their geological data to everyone and as a result netted a huge windfall of information that led to the identification of new, rich seams of gold in a mine that was about to be closed. It's interesting, yes, but I feel nothing revolutionary. The GoldCorp situation says more 'competition' than 'collaboration' to me - effectively GoldCorp ran a competition in which they said 'Find us some gold, win a prize!'. None of the mechanisms that lead to mass collaboration as a genuinely new phenomenon are present in a number of the examples given.
The book is sparesely sourced, but contains interviews (or at least, soundbites) with a number of very prominent figures in the computing industry and other areas. Some of these people are pioneers in some of the emergent ideas that, in my opinion, indicate collaboration as a paradigm shift.
Book Review: Time will tell if it really is a new model for business
Summary: 3 Stars
This book was recommended by a business partner at IBM who thinks big things of the new open source collaborative world. So I was expecting a lot, but I remain unconvinced.
Some of the examples are great such as the gold mining and the role of IBM in open source development but some cases are less clear cut. The reverse engineering of Japanese motorcycles by the newly rising Chinese industry perhaps should give us a warning about how the knowledge economy is ultimately at the mercy of the manufacturing economy that for now are collaborators. Collaboration is fine so long as altruism flourishes and everyone benefits but eventually someone wants more then their fare share of the pie.
The test will be to see how many of the businesses described in the book outlive the current economic downturn. Those that do will have proved the point but I do not think it is a one fit solution for all.
Book Review: Doesn't do what it says on the cover
Summary: 2 Stars
This book has plenty of flaws, many pointed out by other reviewers here, but it's central problem is it fails to explain how mass collaboration changes EVERYTHING. Sure it comes up with some compelling evidence that certain sorts of activity and business involving information have changed and will change more.
But when it alleges that this will extend into the physical world, of car design for instance, its examples are woefully thin. Furthermore the authors simply don't acknowledge that design is only one part of the production of cars and that other physical processes are likely to remain unchanged.
I'm sure if you are a magazine editor and your friends all work in publishing or software everything is changing, but where is the evidence that nursing, bus driving, window cleaning or garden design to pluck a few random examples ever will be revolutionised by mass collaboration?
The authors simply make an extravagant claim they cannot back up.
Furthermore as a web editor looking for practical pointers, the news that the staff at Geek Squad are encouraged to spend all day on online games simply isn't helpful to me. They live in a specialised world and nothing the authors write has convinced me that my own workplace would benefit from me and my colleagues playing online games. Again, the authors' examples don't represent EVERYTHING, they represent life in parts of California, London, Bangalore and a handful of other places.