"We don’t know what the web is for but we’ve adopted it faster than any technology since fire." -- David Weinberger (co-author), The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, 2000
According to Cluetrain, the magic of the Internet is that we are all finding our voices and communicating directly with each other. According to a Harris Interactive poll, 69% of American adults were users of the Internet in 2003 (as opposed to just 9% in 1995). What are these 146 million people talking about? Everything. We’re comparing notes and sharing first-hand knowledge. Cluetrain co-author Christopher Locke calls the Net "a powerful multiplier for intellectual capital." We are talking on many levels in many roles. We are doing it instantaneously and without filters.
One of the ways we are communicating is consumer-to-consumer. I probably don’t need to tell you the worth of reviews posted to www.amazon.com and www.epinions.com. You may have even found one valuable enough that you wanted to "pay it forward" by posting a review of your own, right? Us consumers collectively know more about any given product than the manufacturer does. After all, we have the company’s employees drastically outnumbered. Now that we are talking directly to each other, we are rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with. Companies that decide to listen and join in on the conversation with an open and honest attitude will keep our business. Companies that don’t won’t.
One of the first causalities of this Brave New World Wide Web are monolithic computer software companies that don’t know how to give their customer’s what they really want. Enter open source software. Check out the first four winners of the newly announced Open Source Awards. Whether or not you find those projects to be useful, personally, you will certainly find it interesting to see the motivation behind their existence. What do they portend? Will all software go open source? Hardly. But the ones that remain commercial will have to be just as adaptable in their own way.
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