Wikinomics

How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

By: Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

Narrated by: Alan Sklar

Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

In just the last few years, traditional collaboration in a meeting room, on a conference call, and even in a convention center has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the burgeoning growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the 21st century.

Based on a $9-million research project led by best-selling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing genomes, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding cures for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, and even building motorcycles. You'll read about:

Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc., CEO who used open-source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry.

Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production.

Mature companies, like Procter & Gamble, that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems.

An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the 21st century.

©2006 Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.

Critic reviews

"A clear and exciting preview of how peer innovation will change everything." (Booklist)
"This clear and meticulously researched primer gives business leaders big leg up on mass collaboration possibilities." (Publishers Weekly)

Surprisingly Boring.

It is difficult to take authors seriously who are writing about revolutionary technologies and the next generation but call said generation "youngsters". It seems like a trivial point but it isn't. The author's are so amazed with this generation and the latest technologies that they sound like amateurs. I don't think they understand collaboration any better than the people they are trying to educate, they've just read more articles. I thought I was getting something truly illuminating but it truly wasn't.

Business Buzzword Bingo

Why use English when business pundits provide so many alternatives? This, along with the way that economics is changing the economy, seems to be one of the goals of its authors. Instead of following the central themes of the book, I found myself trying imagine how to "leverage the ecosystem" and what "accelerating exponentially" would be like. For me, the overuse of tied phrases like "new paradigm" and the substitution of adjectives like hypergrowth for actual numerical growth numbers makes this book feel like a caffeine fueled brainstorming session rather than a serious work of business thinking. So, take out that business buzzword bingo board, sit back with some friends and get ready for some serious winnings.

Ra Ra, but Where’s the Beef

The book looks at Wikipedia and a cluster of other very recent open source success as though this were a wild new idea with little or no precedence. The result is almost propagandistic.

A longer term perspective that looked at GNU (a precursor to Linux from the early ‘80s) and professional societies (a very early kind of open sourcing) would have revealed more weighty questions. Most open-source movements have largely failed, especially in computing. Even Linux is starting to seriously lag the state of the art. Reading this book creates the opposite impression.

Wikipedia is amazing; it is changing the world. But why? And will it last? Is it representative? Is it even the right story or is the destruction of Britannica the important story?

I suspect that in the future open source will be primarily a tool that businesses use to compete with each other, with results that are as often destructive as creative. But this book doesn’t even create a framework for discussing this possibility.

Nothing new here

Absolutely nothing new here. Tapscott seems to wait for the latest trends to pass and then writes about them as if they are new. If you've heard of Flickr, YouTube or Facebook, you already know what's in this book.

too long

The audio book consists of islands of important insight separated by oceans of endless verbose rhetoric. I am surprised that this is only 13 hours long, seemed like twice that. The key observations and trends presented are important, some of which have been repackaged to fit this book. The presentation is long, sometimes condescending, repetitive and oversold.

sadly, a disappointment

I was expecting a lot more from this book. If you're looking for something insightful and interesting to listen to, I would suggest either "Freakonomics" or "The World is Flat".

"Wikinomics" blathers on and on about an open-source revolution, and companies that do not embrace the open-source movement will ultimately lose out. I personally would like to believe this, and perhaps there is evidence to really support this general claim, but you will not find it in this book. The author does point out wikipedia and linux and a few other success stories, but these are already very well documented; the author would have you believe he's really pulling back the curtains to show you a world out there that people don't already know about.

The narrator isn't the best, but even an amazing narrator couldn't make this book interesting. The tone of the book is often preachy. This author will not keep your interest beyond the opening passage. A very dull and uninspired book.

Wikinomics

The content of the book is excellent, especially for executives not really clued into the wikiness of the tech world. But the narrator, who has a beautiful and strong speaking voice, is so forceful with every sentence, one would think the book is a series of proclamations on how wiki will save the world. As a result the book's message and content began to seem redundant after Chapter 2. Less would have been more in this case.

Boring

The author repeats the same point over and over again. This is one of the more boring books I have listened to. Point well make but not enought substance.

Techno determinism at it's best

Although I agree with the general thesis of this book, technical and political aspects are so wrong that it completely undermines the credibility of the author. For example, it is stated that MS Windows is an "open" system (monopolies are not "open"). That "tagging" has some relationship to XML (it does not). The book is extremely one sided. I listened to about half of it and gave up. I've only bought two books that I wish I could return... this is one of them.

Repititious

Book was repititious and overly long. Some good thoughts and examples in there, but it could and should have been presented in half the time. I found my mind wandering after a few minutes of the reader's monotone voice. Too much work to get through.