I think the Internet makes two very different things common. I'm not sure what world any given business falls into:
1) The Internet is vast, and this tends to create everybody-wins. There is a virtually inexhaustible range of niches out there. Seriously -- one giant, flowing river of value creating. You are able to dip a bucket into it. You may not end up with your own private ocean (hello, Google) but you will also probably not die of thirst.
I honestly think that this is big, like Industrial Revolution big. Big like "bigger than all the hype about the dot com bubble" big. That was a bunch of PR-funded hype which collapsed in on itself. This is about creation of value -- huge, staggering amounts of aggregate value -- and cutting out a lot of the waste that previously prevented that from reaching people. Industries are being reinvented, and some are being created out of whole cloth.
2) The Internet is deep, and this tends to create winner-takes-most. At the top levels of any intellectual labor there is a step function difference in outcomes between #1 and #2, #2 and #3, etc. We talk about the Long Tail because it is new and exciting, but the fat head is still there. That fat head of SEO means, for example, that executing 1% better than the guy in the #2 spot more than doubles your revenues. By itself. The difference between being Google-successful and being Facebook-successful is several orders of magnitude, even though both of those examples made their founders rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The productivity difference between the best programmers and the worst programmers is widely rumored to be an order of magnitude: I think in the future, we'll see the pay catch up, outside the fairly narrow range of quants on Wall Street. (And the difference between the average programmer and the best day laborer is probably going to keep climbing, too. Returns on one of them keep increasing, you do the math.)
It is a great time to be alive for those of us who can leverage these trends. If I were committed to equality of outcomes, though, I would be terrified.
1) The Internet is vast, and this tends to create everybody-wins. There is a virtually inexhaustible range of niches out there. Seriously -- one giant, flowing river of value creating. You are able to dip a bucket into it. You may not end up with your own private ocean (hello, Google) but you will also probably not die of thirst.
I honestly think that this is big, like Industrial Revolution big. Big like "bigger than all the hype about the dot com bubble" big. That was a bunch of PR-funded hype which collapsed in on itself. This is about creation of value -- huge, staggering amounts of aggregate value -- and cutting out a lot of the waste that previously prevented that from reaching people. Industries are being reinvented, and some are being created out of whole cloth.
2) The Internet is deep, and this tends to create winner-takes-most. At the top levels of any intellectual labor there is a step function difference in outcomes between #1 and #2, #2 and #3, etc. We talk about the Long Tail because it is new and exciting, but the fat head is still there. That fat head of SEO means, for example, that executing 1% better than the guy in the #2 spot more than doubles your revenues. By itself. The difference between being Google-successful and being Facebook-successful is several orders of magnitude, even though both of those examples made their founders rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The productivity difference between the best programmers and the worst programmers is widely rumored to be an order of magnitude: I think in the future, we'll see the pay catch up, outside the fairly narrow range of quants on Wall Street. (And the difference between the average programmer and the best day laborer is probably going to keep climbing, too. Returns on one of them keep increasing, you do the math.)
It is a great time to be alive for those of us who can leverage these trends. If I were committed to equality of outcomes, though, I would be terrified.