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Imagine a world where supply no longer equals
demand. A world where a company craving greater market share
gives away its most valuable product -- and generates millions
of dollars. A world where the company that boasts the greatest
chunk of consumer demand experiences even more demand; where
the antagonistic relationship between buyer and seller has
been replaced with a cooperative, knowledge-based exchange;
where companies in every industry think like futurists,
personalize products and services regardless of cost, target
individuals rather than blanket the masses, and renovate
old products instead of just creating new ones.
Welcome to tomorrow -- and to a world governed
by a friction-free economy.
In the bestselling tradition of Being Digital,
Crossing the Chasm, and The Digital Estate, The Friction-Free
Economy provides an extraordinary look into the not-so-distant
economic future, a future in which business will be so dramatically
altered that we will all be forced -- from CEO to small-business
owner, senior-level executive to middle manager -- to rethink
what we do and how we do it. In this book, T. G. Lewis,
one of the foremost experts on the information age, explores
the phenomenon of Silicon Valley and its role as the incubator
of innovative business models and strategies.
The Friction-Free Economy illustrates how
the economic realities of Silicon Valley will soon hold
true for all businesses -- from the high-tech Intels to
the lowest of the low tech, such as restaurants and car
dealerships -- and provides a workable, eminently practical
business model for any company looking to survive and thrive
in the friction-free economy. Using real-life examples from
such cutting-edge companies as Microsoft, Intel, Netscape,
Sega, and Sony, Lewis examines:
- The phenomenon of speed: In the friction-free
economy, new industries, products, and ideas circle the
globe in record time. Your company is either quick or
dead.
- The principles of a new era: Strategies
that mark this new age are mainstreaming, building strategic
alliances, and targeting tribes instead of the masses,
to name a few. One must master these techniques or be
left behind.
- The tricks of the trade: Sophisticated-sounding
tools such as learning curves, marketing models, and product-space
disintegration determine life or death in this economy.
They will soon be used universally by organizations industrywide.
- The nonintuitive consequences of a digital
economy: Inverse economics will replace diminishing returns,
volume pricing will win out over premium pricing, and
narrowcasting will overrule broadcasting, culminating
in a paradigm shift unlike anything we've witnessed since
the Industrial Revolution.
Using market behavior in the software industry
as an example for understanding the bigger business picture,
The Friction-Free Economy makes sense of a world
growing increasingly digital with ambiguous, intangible
products and transparent transactions and provides a series
of guiding principles for creating business success in any
industry. At once revolutionary and accessible, it explores
why it is no longer possible to conduct business as usual
and why it is essential that we embrace this model, master
its lexicon, and adapt -- as quickly as possible -- to this
new way of life.
T. G. Lewis, Ph.D., is professor and
chairman of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School
in Monterey, California. He was editor in chief for IEEE
Software magazine from 1987 to 1990 and of Computer
magazine from 1993 to 1994, where he still writes the monthly
column "Binary Critic." A regular contributor
to Upside, he lives in Salinas, California.
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