The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business is Small

PREFACE

Over the past 10 years I've been a keen observer of the business landscape. I had an inkling something was going on when I left corporate life for the first time in 2005. It was a time when the web 2.0 era was gathering a head of steam. A real sense of empowerment was sweeping the entrepreneurial community. Many of the tools of business were all of a sudden becoming accessible and easier to use. You didn't need anyone's help to find out how to do something because information was entering the ‘on-demand' realm. While most of us still had VCRs in our houses with the time blinking on 12 am, some savvy tech geeks decided to refocus their efforts externally. They decided to not just build something for themselves, but to build something for all of us — something end users could play with, improve upon and even use to build something else. The insight of creating for further creation and humanising and socialising business was inspired.

This was a bit unexpected because after the dotcom crash a lot of us (me included) had doubts about the technology utopia the internet promised to provide. But, while it was delayed, it has arrived. What's arrived has turned out to be far more widespread and structural than most people predicted. It turns out that information that's freed up and accessible by all has an equal and opposite impact on the physical world. Information becomes objects. Information changes the shape of the physical world. Information changes the social and physical ...