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What do most of the technical and business
innovations of the past 200 years have in common? Moshe
Yudkowsky says the answer is simple: disaggregation.
Disaggregation means taking things apart
-- for example, the break-up of AT&T, which vastly improved
phone service in every way. But there are more subtle examples.
Digital music doesn't rely on records, tapes, or CDs; digital
photographs don't require ink or paper; and digital movies
don't need film. This disaggregation of information from
the storage medium has enabled millions of people to create
and share their work (and others') far more easily than
ever before, with truly enormous implications.
Yudkowsky details exactly how disaggregation
works, describing five different ways of taking things apart,
the many benefits of disaggregation, and how to use disaggregation
to develop new innovations. The book is filled with dozens
of examples from the past 200 years demonstrating that some
of the most important innovations in history -- interchangeable
parts, the automobile, personal computers -- were actually
examples of disaggregation in action.
The Pebble and the Avalanche also
offers strategies for successfully adapting to a disaggregation
revolution, and explores the futility and serious negative
consequences of trying to suppress disaggregation, again
using actual examples. And Yudkowsky points towards the
future, identifying three industries that are about to be
completely transformed by disaggregation
Moshe Yudkowsky is president of Disaggregate,
a consulting firm, and is Chair of the Midwest Speech Technology
Association. Prior to that he was Senior System Architect
for speech recognition at Dialogic. He received a Ph.D.
in Condensed Matter Physics from Northwestern University,
where he was assistant director of the Nuclear Magnetic
Resonance Laboratory for two years. He has also worked at
Bell Labs, and is the author of several patents.
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