英语书籍:Mesh(2)节选
THE MESH: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky
That's possible because our GPS-enabled mobile devices move in real
space and time with us. An Urbanspoon app on your phone, for
example, can pick up your location and guide you to nearby
recommended restaurants. The Craigslist app can help you quickly
find a mechanic in a pinch. Physical goods are also electronically
tracked by location and time think of the UPS or FedEx tracking
numbers that tell you where your package is at the moment. As a
result, the network can connect us to the things we want exactly
when we want them. We can increasingly gain convenient access to
those goods, greatly reducing the need to own them. Why buy,
maintain, and store a table saw or a lawn mower or a car when they
are easily and less expensively available to use when we want them?
Mobile computing, enabled by GPS, WiFi, 3G, and Bluetooth, is
growing at an explosive rate, and is expected to overtake desktop
computing within only a few years. What's more, the game-changing
expansion of Web-enabled mobile networks has converged with the
explosion of social ones. Each reinforces the other. Within a
historical eye-blink, we have constructed a whole new language of
sharing. You text, poke, and tweet your friends to meet at the pub
you chose on Yelp, and then share the evening's goofy photos on
Facebook the hungover morning after. Awesome.
Something else has changed, too. The credit and spending binge that
crashed the economy has left us with a different kind of hangover.
We're increasingly conscious of how we've raced through our personal
and environmental assets. We're forced to rethink what we care
about. Throughout the world, we are reconsidering how we relate to
the things in our lives and what we want from our businesses and
communities. We need a way to get the goods and services we actually
want and need, but at less cost, both personal and environmental.
Fortunately, we're quickly gaining more power to do so.
For now, most companies stubbornly stick to various twists on a
single tried-and-true formula: Create a product or service, sell it,
and collect money. Just sell the guy a lawn mower and watch him walk
out the door. Few businesspeople, including most entrepreneurs and
venture capitalists, have imagined creating wealth any other way.
Though they may use social media to market their products, their
minds are still stuck in a 2-D buyer/ seller/own-it world.
Around these entrenched businesses, a new model is starting to take
root and grow, one in which consumers have more choices, more tools,
more information, and more power to guide those choices. I call this
emerging model "The Mesh." In recent years , thousands of Mesh
businesses have been created and scaled up, a few into well-known
brands. These businesses understand and cleverly exploit the perfect
storm of mobile, location-based capabilities, Web and social network
growth, changing consumer attitudes, and the historically understood
market benefits of share platforms. In this book, I'll explore the
ideas that underlie the myriad forms of the Mesh, and why it conveys
extraordinary competitive advantages to entrepreneurs and
businesses.
Fundamentally, the Mesh is based on network-enabled sharing--on
access rather than ownership. The central strategy is, in effect, to
"sell" the same product multiple times. Multiple sales multiply
profits, and customer contact. Multiple contacts multiply
opportunity for additional sales, for strengthening a brand, for
improving a competitive service, and for deepening and extending the
relationship with customers. Using sophisticated information
systems, the Mesh also deploys physical assets more efficiently.
That boosts the bottom line, with the added advantage of lowering
pressure on natural resources. Not always and not for everything,
but a Mesh network that manages shared transactions has the growing
capacity to soar past a company that sells something once to one
owner. All of us reap the rewards of dramatically improved service
and choice at a lower personal cost.
This has been my life's work: how to get more real value for people
by leveraging the Web as a sharing platform. In 1993, I had the
terrific good fortune to work with Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly
in creating GNN, the first commercial Web site. We designed the
first online transaction and ran the first ads on the Web. We helped
unleash the Internet revolution, which uprooted and reconfigured
most major industries and business models, displaced leading brands,
and forced the redesign of hundreds of key products. We sold GNN to
AOL.
A few years later, I saw a very young boy at O'Hare mimicking taking
a photograph with his fingers. Instead of holding his "viewfinder"
up to his eye, he held it out in front, like a view screen. There it
was. Digital images were clearly the future. Using the Web, here was
an opportunity to turn the business of sharing and printing photos
on its ear. Kamran Mohsenin and I began riffing about a better,
faster, and less wasteful model. Those conversations led to the
creation of Ofoto.
Ofoto used the Web's rich and growing digital infrastructure to
share photos through people's social networks of family, friends,
and colleagues. As we hoped, Ofoto became very profitable while
generating far less waste than the traditional film model. We sold
Ofoto to Eastman Kodak, where it became the company's core digital
photo service. We grew to be the largest online photo sharing and
printing service in the world, with well over 40 million customers.
Over the last several years, I've continued to bring a variety of
Web and mobile services to market, while sustaining a concern about
nature and communities. During my career, I have worked with the
founders of Yahoo!, AOL, Google, PayPal, and Mozilla. Again and
again I've watched the same process unfold: an innovator sees a new
opportunity, exploits it, inspires others, and we all benefit.
In this fast-moving environment, it has become an essential business
skill to recognize, well ahead of your competitors, the
discontinuity that generates new platforms, models, expectations,
and brands. See it first. Act. Win.
The Mesh is that next big opportunity--for creating new businesses
and renewing old ones, for our communities, and for the planet. And
it's just beginning.
_________________________________________________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(ZT)
Lisa Gansky has been a founder and CEO of multiple Internet
companies, including GNN and Ofoto. She currently advises and
invests in several social ventures, including New Resource Bank,
Squidoo, Convio, TasteBook, MePlease, Slide, Instructables, and
Greener World Media. She is a cofounder of Dos Margaritas, a
conservation-focused social venture. She lives in Napa, California.
THE MESH: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky
That's possible because our GPS-enabled mobile devices move in real
space and time with us. An Urbanspoon app on your phone, for
example, can pick up your location and guide you to nearby
recommended restaurants. The Craigslist app can help you quickly
find a mechanic in a pinch. Physical goods are also electronically
tracked by location and time think of the UPS or FedEx tracking
numbers that tell you where your package is at the moment. As a
result, the network can connect us to the things we want exactly
when we want them. We can increasingly gain convenient access to
those goods, greatly reducing the need to own them. Why buy,
maintain, and store a table saw or a lawn mower or a car when they
are easily and less expensively available to use when we want them?
Mobile computing, enabled by GPS, WiFi, 3G, and Bluetooth, is
growing at an explosive rate, and is expected to overtake desktop
computing within only a few years. What's more, the game-changing
expansion of Web-enabled mobile networks has converged with the
explosion of social ones. Each reinforces the other. Within a
historical eye-blink, we have constructed a whole new language of
sharing. You text, poke, and tweet your friends to meet at the pub
you chose on Yelp, and then share the evening's goofy photos on
Facebook the hungover morning after. Awesome.
Something else has changed, too. The credit and spending binge that
crashed the economy has left us with a different kind of hangover.
We're increasingly conscious of how we've raced through our personal
and environmental assets. We're forced to rethink what we care
about. Throughout the world, we are reconsidering how we relate to
the things in our lives and what we want from our businesses and
communities. We need a way to get the goods and services we actually
want and need, but at less cost, both personal and environmental.
Fortunately, we're quickly gaining more power to do so.
For now, most companies stubbornly stick to various twists on a
single tried-and-true formula: Create a product or service, sell it,
and collect money. Just sell the guy a lawn mower and watch him walk
out the door. Few businesspeople, including most entrepreneurs and
venture capitalists, have imagined creating wealth any other way.
Though they may use social media to market their products, their
minds are still stuck in a 2-D buyer/ seller/own-it world.
Around these entrenched businesses, a new model is starting to take
root and grow, one in which consumers have more choices, more tools,
more information, and more power to guide those choices. I call this
emerging model "The Mesh." In recent years , thousands of Mesh
businesses have been created and scaled up, a few into well-known
brands. These businesses understand and cleverly exploit the perfect
storm of mobile, location-based capabilities, Web and social network
growth, changing consumer attitudes, and the historically understood
market benefits of share platforms. In this book, I'll explore the
ideas that underlie the myriad forms of the Mesh, and why it conveys
extraordinary competitive advantages to entrepreneurs and
businesses.
Fundamentally, the Mesh is based on network-enabled sharing--on
access rather than ownership. The central strategy is, in effect, to
"sell" the same product multiple times. Multiple sales multiply
profits, and customer contact. Multiple contacts multiply
opportunity for additional sales, for strengthening a brand, for
improving a competitive service, and for deepening and extending the
relationship with customers. Using sophisticated information
systems, the Mesh also deploys physical assets more efficiently.
That boosts the bottom line, with the added advantage of lowering
pressure on natural resources. Not always and not for everything,
but a Mesh network that manages shared transactions has the growing
capacity to soar past a company that sells something once to one
owner. All of us reap the rewards of dramatically improved service
and choice at a lower personal cost.
This has been my life's work: how to get more real value for people
by leveraging the Web as a sharing platform. In 1993, I had the
terrific good fortune to work with Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly
in creating GNN, the first commercial Web site. We designed the
first online transaction and ran the first ads on the Web. We helped
unleash the Internet revolution, which uprooted and reconfigured
most major industries and business models, displaced leading brands,
and forced the redesign of hundreds of key products. We sold GNN to
AOL.
A few years later, I saw a very young boy at O'Hare mimicking taking
a photograph with his fingers. Instead of holding his "viewfinder"
up to his eye, he held it out in front, like a view screen. There it
was. Digital images were clearly the future. Using the Web, here was
an opportunity to turn the business of sharing and printing photos
on its ear. Kamran Mohsenin and I began riffing about a better,
faster, and less wasteful model. Those conversations led to the
creation of Ofoto.
Ofoto used the Web's rich and growing digital infrastructure to
share photos through people's social networks of family, friends,
and colleagues. As we hoped, Ofoto became very profitable while
generating far less waste than the traditional film model. We sold
Ofoto to Eastman Kodak, where it became the company's core digital
photo service. We grew to be the largest online photo sharing and
printing service in the world, with well over 40 million customers.
Over the last several years, I've continued to bring a variety of
Web and mobile services to market, while sustaining a concern about
nature and communities. During my career, I have worked with the
founders of Yahoo!, AOL, Google, PayPal, and Mozilla. Again and
again I've watched the same process unfold: an innovator sees a new
opportunity, exploits it, inspires others, and we all benefit.
In this fast-moving environment, it has become an essential business
skill to recognize, well ahead of your competitors, the
discontinuity that generates new platforms, models, expectations,
and brands. See it first. Act. Win.
The Mesh is that next big opportunity--for creating new businesses
and renewing old ones, for our communities, and for the planet. And
it's just beginning.
_________________________________________________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(ZT)
Lisa Gansky has been a founder and CEO of multiple Internet
companies, including GNN and Ofoto. She currently advises and
invests in several social ventures, including New Resource Bank,
Squidoo, Convio, TasteBook, MePlease, Slide, Instructables, and
Greener World Media. She is a cofounder of Dos Margaritas, a
conservation-focused social venture. She lives in Napa, California.
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