On Wed, 14 Jun 1995 BIRRED@dnr.state.wi.us wrote:
> Finding and using whatever gives an organization an advantage is part of
> what drives our economy. But I submit that in an environment of freely
> and instantly available information, this advantage is only fleeting and
> cannot be sustained. What we are more likely to see in the future, IMO,
> is a great deal of leap-frogging among competitors: they will make
> marginal improvements over their previous products so that they look
> better than the competition's last marginal improvement, and they will
> occasionally find breakthroughs that will provide a temporary advantage
> until the competition catches up.
This strikes me as a kind of Malthusian theory of information flow. If we
need grounds for a more invigorating view of things, shouldn't we look to
a) the necessarily gradual _articulation_ of information in the
marketplace, and b) the wellnigh infinite _scalability_ of information
that might be relevant to somebody's competitive decision-making. The
rapid information flow you speak of suggests things like financial
markets, commodities, and so on: hard, utterly tangible facts, usually in
some kind of numerical form, to which we respond with a phone call to our
brokers (or ad agency, or law firm, or accountants, but never our local
L-O consultant :-) ). The deeper kind of information, that can drive an
organization towards success before it is even fully articulate, doesn't
flow quite so easily, does it.
--
Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen
jamzen@world.std.com
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