Lessons from the Emerging Network Age

Paul Grahm has published a must-read essay on What Businesses Can Learn from Open-Source. His observations are succinct, self-evident, and refreshingly open to the future that large corporations are so despretly trying not to acknowledge. Forgive me for the grandiose tone, but the rise of Open-Source is inextricably interwined with the highly disruptive rise of the network, as a new major form of social organization. It is not an exaggeration to say that the network will change the world as much as the free market.

Some proof of the bold claim I just made can be found in Iraq out of all places. In Iraq what we are really witnessing is a clash between an insurgency organized along the lines of a SPIN network (Segmented, Polycentric, Ideologically bound Network -- a very powerful and insidious foe) VS. the heirarchial US military (like Goliath, large, powerful, but very slow and clumsy) with virtually unlimited financial resources. Strangely, Microsoft is learning the exact same lessons as the US military in the realities of this emerging age of the network.

Perhaps the most important of the lessons is that bottom-up decision making and communication always topple top-down rivals. With bottom up decisions, those who are closest to reality (by reality, I mean "that which is real [i.e. exists in the concrete sense]", not the assessment or interpretation of reality that top-down decision making depends upon) are able to immediately assess and respond to challenges and opprotunities in real time. Highly organized and heavily controlled opponents are helpless when confronted with such a dynamic foe. Remember the minute men and the red coats of the American Revolution? Why did the minute men win? Amazing how clear things can be when you just talk them through... 

Anyways, enough rambling, I need sleep. Go read Grahm's essay.