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The Long Tripe, Wisdom of Hacks

Customer Rating:

The authors are hacks. This is the worst kind of pseudoscience, and it's way too long. The authors build a case for various forms of collaboration using anecdotes and a few statistics (w/ fewer references). Before the reader has a chance to ask "how do I know collaboration was the factor that accelerated this company's growth" or "what else might have been going wrong at the other company" the authors quickly make up a few scientific sounding words and speak in broad generalizations about what successful companies of the future will do. The following comes from page 103: "In the late 1990s P&G launched an internal survey and discovered it was spending $1.5 billion on R&D, generating lots of patents, but using less than 10 percent of them in it's own products. Yes, that's less than 10 percent!" Thanks Tapscott, it really didn't sink in the first time, but now that you've repeated yourself and added an exclamation point, I'm blown away. Yes, blown away! Don't bother to mentioning whether or not this is a reasonable number, how it compares to others in the industry, other industries that do more or less collaboration, or any other metrics to provide context for this statement. They never even explicitly show how this number changes as a result of collaboration. The smartest thing the authors did was to create a title that rides Freakonomics' coat tails. It's not in the same class with that, or the Long Tail, Gladwell's books, Wisdom of Crowds, etc... this is the kind of tripe Taleb rails on. They were clearly in a hurry to get Wikinomics the shelves before someone beat them to the punch with "The Wiki Point."

Could be helpful if you are new to the topic...	Customer Rating:
As has already been stated, the view of the world of mass collaboration presented in this book is rather simplistic. It could be helpful, though, if you are new to the topic and would like to understand what "emergence", "wikis" and "prosumers" mean and how the term "knowledge" is changing in meaning.

Sorely disappointing

Customer Rating:

I heard a lot of buzz about Wikinomics when it was published a few years ago, but when I finally picked it up a few weeks ago I was sorely disappointed. I'm very surprised that it gets such a high overall rating on Amazon. First and foremost the book is extremely repetitive. I feel that instead of 300 odd pages it could have easily been under 100 while becoming significantly more readable. Granted, some sections are very well written, but I found most sections of the book difficult to read for more then 20-30 minutes at a time. This is a subject that I'm very interested in, and am not clueless about, so perhaps I'm a bit biased in that I was already familiar with most of the ideas in the book. However, I still feel that there was way too much hyperbole and not enough critical analysis. The 7 "business models" that the authors present (which aren't really business models) have so many things in common that dedicating a large chapter to each just doesn't make sense. The authors use words like 'b-webs' that no one else uses as if they were widely used. Sure, one of the authors coined this word in one of his previous books but it hasn't caught. Deal with it. There's no need to try and force it on us here again. When it comes to criticisms of the authors' ideas, they get brushed aside without any critical evaluation by just citing another author that agrees with Wikinomics and stating something along the lines of "X is wrong, but Y is right". Having some economic data would have been much more useful than stating "the tide is coming, get in line with the new business models" over and over. Maybe the book would have been better if the authors published it through a Wiki? I think it would have quickly been edited down to about 70 pages then.

Touches on important points and gets the details wrong

Customer Rating:

This is the sort of book that often comes out about new social and technological developments... it touches on all of the hotspots surrounding wikis and massively parallel collaboration, even name-drops many important people and cases related to each, but usually gets the details wrong. Precisely because the issues raised are so important to understanding how we as a society can collaborate on the scale of millions of people working together on similar projects, I must disrecommend this book to anyone interested in the topic : it will hamper those reading it from later coming to a true understanding of how these processes work. The writing is clear and informative in places, but repetetive and obfuscating in others. The whole could have been improved by being cut down to 1/4 this length, with better sources and serious analysis.

The future of economics

Customer Rating:

That the nature of work, collaboration, and other economic activities is changing very rapidly these days is indisputable. However, it is not immediately clear to everyone what are the forces that are driving this change and what sorts of effects it may have. This book tries to answer these and many other questions in the realm of how the latest advances in various information tools are enabling the radical shift in collaborative production. It is a very readable book aimed at the general audience. The fact that it doesn't delve too deeply into the technical details (like the "Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More") may be a plus, as this way it may be more suitable to appeal to the wider readership base. Overall, it is an interesting read if you are not familiar with the general trends in open and collaborative economy.