Matt Asay: “[F]ocus on maximizing abundance, and then sell value around minimizing the complexity inherent in abundance.. The old model was to assume that the value was in the software itself and to therefore lock it up. It turns out, however, as Tim O’Reilly notes, that data is the real value, not bits and bytes. You don’t discover or, rather, uncover, that value until you have abundance.”
The deeper down in the technology you get, the bigger the surprise when you see simple facts after taking a few steps backwards again.
Land, labor, capital, entrepreneurship: the four basic ingredients of economic growth. Data isn’t one of them but it could be; if it must slot in, I’d set it down as fuel for entrepreneurship.
To be perfectly frank, I don’t even think the data (or the consequent information, or even the knowledge or the wisdom higher up the data processing and utilization ladder) is the key factor: I think it’s the people.
You can have good technology absent of data to populate it, but you can’t employ any data if you don’t have good technology to encompass it.
Data and systems are a fushion of capital & labor.
Digitization commoditizes capital, reducing computer systems’ absolute cost as well as their relative cost to other fixed forms of capital and relative to the value of useful data.
Doing more with less stuff ($) and finding ways to hook data — information — to people contexts is increasing productivity.
As we find smarter ways to apply human connections to humans and to data, spending large sums on inflexible systems makes less & less sense and gets negated.