The Intuition Economy
posted September 4, 2009, 7:50 am | Log In To Post Comments | 
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Tags: Dark Star Line, Black Opus, Intution Economy
It is clear that the evolution of business models on the internet is becoming very rapid. Most of the services that are now considered to be in danger from new models were considered cutting edge not long ago. For some it has only taken about 5 years for their model to begin to show the chinks of growing obsolescence. This growing obsolescence is due to the fact that as companies grow very large they can no longer act quickly, and the new rules that are put in place to organize them slows down innovation and snuffs out intuition. A major impact on the speed of extinction for some of these models is the fact that complete applications to test the market for validation can now be developed and deployed very quickly and very cheaply. Many of the models for analysis and use of information to make a business decision (Velocity) no longer work as the time that you have to make a decision based on the information collected has collapsed to the point that the analysis must now be done at the speed of intuition. Because of the compression of time that companies have to make technology decisions we are in a new phase of intelligence on the internet. “The Intuition Economy”. This is an era where the flashing speed of intuition is a company’s most valuable asset. The amount of information that can be collected for an analysis of a decision can be very large. The time to gather this information using computers is not as fast as an intuitive guess. Once you gather any information it must be filtered down to an amount that can reasonably be acted on by a human. In most companies many individuals would need to meet over a span of time to discuss the information and how to act on it. This approach will no longer work. By the time that the decision is made using the old process the intuitive company has acted and in a sense is in the future of the process. Applications that are built very open can survive in the intuition economy as there is very little cost in adding new functionality. In fact the cost of adding the new functionality is far less than the cost of not adding it. Two companies that are good examples of this currently are Goolge and Apple. They are different in what they do (at the moment) but they both are very intuitive. At Apple Steve Jobs is the intuitive force. The company is run very top down with Mr. Jobs intuition and experience being the driving force behind all decisions. Because of this Apple with itunes and the ipod have been able to make decisions and act on them at a speed that has crushed all competitors. By the time they decide on how to compete he is 5 to 10 steps ahead…and in the future; knowing and creating what is next…not guessing.. Google is a mixture of bottom up and top down. As a company they allow the intuition of their developers to bubble to the top and then the two founders decide or intuit what will be next. This shows very much in their varied offerings and their scattered technology and architecture. Because of the intuition that they have harnessed they have left all of there competitors in the past while they also know and create what is next.
Comments:
Dark Star Line, I'm really enjoying these posts. Obviously not music related but related none the less. Yes, in the online world it doesn't take long for things to get stale. And your two examples of companies that pull this off are bang on. You could actually throw Facebook in there as well. They've really changed the social network arena with their "platform". That's why MySpace is not trying to play catch-up. I think on demand streaming sites like Spotify will be the next level as well.
Additional Tags: Myspace, Facebook, Spotify
posted on September 4, 2009, 11:39 am
