The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

5.1. The Internet Changes Everything

In 2000, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger published a book entitled The Cluetrain Manifesto, boldly announcing that although most corporations did not yet realize it, the Internet had already brought about "the end of business as usual."

Taking Martin Luther as their model, they nailed their "95 theses" on the virtual door. Two of their fundamental theses—numbers 1 and 6, to be precise—bear upon the whole philosophy of large-scale software development, and they form the point of departure for this chapter:

Thesis 1: Markets are conversations.

Thesis 6: The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

The point of Thesis 1 is that companies can no longer talk at their customers, suppliers, collaborators, and competitors. They have to talk with them; and those companies that don't figure out how to do this will wither and die.

The point of Thesis 6 is that the Internet has fundamentally changed the nature of conversations that companies have with their markets.

These are simple facts about how the business world now works. If your company is going to survive and thrive, it must develop an information technology (IT) infrastructure that facilitates conversations with the people and companies you deal with.