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: Good Overview and Thought Generator
Summary: 4 Stars
The book is a good read for anyone who's attempting to understand wiki's and other related technologies. Also gives a good overview on how they can be used or affect how organizations collaborate in the future.
As another reviewer noted, it's a great overview but not a good techie review of the technology.
Book Review: Couldn't get enough of it!
Summary: 5 Stars
Wikinomics opened my eyes to a whole new world of how to use technology to grow your business. As an HR professional it's been tough recruiting talent in a tight labor market. I was intrigued by the notion of using the web to find and incentify talent, without increasing headcount. The information about the net generation was great. I love the shared knowledge and abundance of information. Fabulous read!Book Review: a waste of time
Summary: 2 Stars
There are lots of simplistic syllogistic arguments put forth without much elaborations in this verbose repetitive book. The theme and arguments not strong and quite some examples are pretty bad and confusing. The so-called predictions are conjured up without much profound thought processes. they also lack quantitative analyses, which I would expect for all arguments put forth. The author doesn't seem to have spent much time in researching when writing up all these college level arguments. To give analogies, this book is full of arguments like "if you are hungry, eat", "you need to sue, find a lawyer".Book Review: Interesting, but repetitive and without good analysis
Summary: 3 Stars
It is an interesting book, which presents many examples of mass collaboration. Definitely worth reading. At the same time, authors do not try to analyze benefits and shortcomings of open collaborations critically, they only list its perceived advantages. I was also a little frustrated with repetitive use of the same examples and ideas throughout the book. Book Review: Interesting, if one-sided view
Summary: 4 Stars
It's buried amid the many anecdotes and musings, but the critical idea dates back to 1937. The authors retroactively call it Coase's Law: "A firm will tend to expand until the costs of organizing a transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction on the open market." Traditionally, this explained why corporations grew to such huge proportions. But an old idea becomes new again when the premises behind it change. Plummeting barriers in international trade and especially in the infosphere drop the cost of trading with others; soaring costs of specialized personnel and equipment (over a billion US$ for a new microprocessor fab, for example) make the do-it-yourself approach decreasingly feasible. Without changing Coase's Law in the slightest, the modern landscape of technology and communication makes exchanges of data, skill, and material the norm instead of the exception. Companies farm out work they used to do internally; taken to its extreme, the organization of one member becomes the usual case.
When communication costs go to zero, or so near zero as not to matter, whole new organizations and kinds of organizations arise, Wikipedia, Linux, and GNU being some of the best known. These self-organizing groups very nearly represent a whole new economy, in which hard-won reputation represents wealth. With traditional conglomerate industry at one end of the spectrum and every-man-a-nation at the other, the authors identify many proportions in which monopoly and free-agency can combine. Amazon typifies one such blending, not just in the millions of volunteer-written reviews they host, but in other ways of technologically opening its borders. Marketplaces of intellectual property, "ideagoras", replace closely held portfolios of patents. Counter-examples exist too, like the increasingly desperate attempts by major music and movie distributors to apply nineteenth-century legislative solutions to twenty-first century media technology.
The authors provide a wide-ranging survey, with examples from many areas. As happens so often with books of this type, however the authors seem to mistake piles of anecdotes for bodies of data that can be analyzed with real rigor. That comes in part from their enthusiasm for the transformative power of mass collaboration - it's easy to get swept up in their mood, and equally easy to see only one force at work when in fact there are many. None of that invalidates the authors' point, however, that emerging ideas of free exchange have made serious inroads into the planned economies that used to (and still do) exist within major corporations. And, just as much as these trends redefine organizations, they redefine the individual, as well.
-- wiredweird