The Internet

I've been reading….   In 1986 a book titled The Alchemist was published. Since its original release in Brazil it has sold more than 65 million copies world-wide making it one of the most popular books of all time. This is in partly due to the author's skill at marketing. In Russia, for example it had sold less than 1,000 copies and the book and author were dropped by the Russian publisher. The author found a different publisher and took the unusual step of making a free, digital Russian-language version available on his website. Immediately sales of the print edition picked up. In the first year it sold 10,000 copies, then next year it sold 100,000 copies and by 2008 1,000,000 copies were sold in Russia.  The author says that offering his work for free on the Internet was key to stimulating sales of hard-copy editions, and urges publishers to adopt this counterintuitive marketing strategy to keep print books alive. In 2007 Suze Orman offered an online version for Women & Money for free on Oprah's website for 24 hours. After readers downloaded more than 1 million copies, sales of the print edition took off.   The world is upside-down, inside-out, counterintuitive and confusing. The premier question for business is how to navigate in a world that has changed radically and forever.   Who would have imagined a free classified service could have had a profound and permanent effect on the newspaper industry that kids with cameras and internet connections could have larger audiences that cable networks could, that loaners with keyboards could bring down politicians and companies and that college dropouts could build companies worth billions?  They didn't do it by breaking rules. They operated by new rules of a new age:   ·          Customers are now in charge. They can be heard around the world and have an impact on huge institutions in an instant. ·          People can find each other anywhere and coalesce around you---or against you. ·          The mass market is dead, replaced by mass niches. ·          The Cluetrain Manifest published in 2000 considered a primary work of the internet age wrote: "Markets are conversations." That means the key skill in any organization today is not marketing but conversing. ·           We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. The control of products or distribution will no longer guarantee a premium and a profit. ·          Enabling customers to collaborate with you---in creating, distributing, marketing, and supporting products--- is what creates a premium in today's market. ·          The most successful enterprises today are networks---which extract as little value as possible so they can grow as big as possible---and the platforms on which those networks are built. ·          Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is.   Google's founders understand the change brought by the internet. That is why they are considered the fastest growing company in the history of the world. The same is true for Facebook, Craigslist. Wikipedia, Amazon, and Digg.