Sixian

...we learned how much less important viral effects are to long-term value creation than defensibilies like network effects.While viral effects are a useful attribute of products to reduce the expense of acquiring new users, network effects remain the key driver of value creation for startups in the digital age by keeping people using them.

Barnes reports that Egyptian farmers in the Nile Valley maintain irrigation ditches not just to keep the water flowing, but also to “sustain communal ties with other farmers.” 20 Similar protocols prevail in Nikhil Anand’s Hydraulic City, in which the anthropologist shows how the maintenance of water infrastructures binds residents, plumbers,... See more

Enterprise Gateway Marketplaces are going to be a big part of the ongoing marketplace revolution.  They make it manageable for small vendors to sell into S&P 500 customers that are normally out of reach and make it easier for enterprises to work with outside vendors to get the latest business products and services without having to bring them... See more

A Company’s Social Contract With Its Labor Supply

Now that we have the Internet and better ways of creating trust with people outside of an organization, it should be possible to make it faster/better/cheaper for nodes inside a corporation to link with outside nodes to complete certain tasks. 

Because I'm going to have the hottest new songs. The problem is the consumer wants more than that. They want the old stuff to. So all of a sudden the power in that relationship moves from the distributor who can create new content and also has the consumer relationship to who owns the IP that the consumer wants, the IP that consumer wants a lot of... See more

Male storytelling is a sublimated hunting narrative, female storytelling is a sublimated gathering narrative. One is born of brags, the other is born of rumors. One kind of writing throws a metaphorical spear at a metaphorical beast, attempting to kill it and bring back the carcass. The other kind puts relatively unresisting things into bags, and... See more

We should always ask: what, exactly, is being maintained? “Is it the thing itself,” Graham and Thrift ask, “or the negotiated order that surrounds it, or some ‘larger’ entity?” Often the answer is all of the above. Maintenance traverses scales.