With the moves form batch processing to time sharing to personal computers, users did more and more of their own data entry. The Internet extends this capability significantly. Users typically complete transactions without involving vendors. We pay income tax, renew automobile licenses, purchase goods for our homes and businesses, and contract for business and consumer services online. This is often more convenient and economical for the user, and nearly eliminates the transaction cost. Organizations are also able to aggregate and mine transaction data, looking for patterns and preferences. This is common in high-volume retail applications like the Netflix movie rental service or online book sales. The retailer recommends movies or books based upon prior purchases of the user and others.
Going beyond transaction processing, the Internet enables applications that derive value from user supplied data. Take, for example, the case of Amazon.com, the first online bookstore. When Barnes and Noble, a large bookstore chain, established an Internet site, many predicted they would quickly displace the upstart Amazon since they were selling essentially the same books. Amazon prevailed because they encouraged users to write reviews of the books they purchased. Both companies sold the same books, but the customer reviews differentiated Amazon.
Many of today’s Internet applications center on user supplied content. Web sites allow users to publish their own music, videos, and photographs, and others to find and retrieve them. Users supply descriptions of everything for sale in online marketplaces like Ebay and Craigslist. Millions of users contribute to blogs (web logs) on the Internet, and many organizations use them to communicate internally and with outside stakeholders like customers, suppliers and shareholders. The book you are now reading is a wiki, created by inviting users to draft and subsequently revise and improve chapters. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is perhaps the best known example of an application based solely on user content. Organizations often use wikis for applications like internal knowledge sharing, project planning and documentation. Audio and video podcasts, recorded material that is delivered automatically to subscribers, are also common on the Internet and within organizations.
We might ask what motivates people to contribute explicit content without pay. Why take the time to improve a
Wikipedia article or submit a bug fix to an open source program? Why contribute to the book you are now reading?
Motivation includes:
- Creating or writing something, perhaps a program or reference source, for ones own use
- Having the pleasure of knowing others with shared interest may find it useful
- Having fun creating it
- Enhancing one’s reputation
As Yochai Benlker says “We act for material gain, but also for psychological well-being and gratification, and for social connectedness 1 These motivations in conjunction with the fact that “the declining price of computation, communication, and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world's population-on” lead to significant, non-market information production.
How many millions of hours did Internet users contribute yesterday? What is the economic value of those hours -- how does the Gross Contributed Product compare to the Gross National Product? What will it be in ten years? Might this non-market economy one day rival the market economy in importance? (Stay-at-home mothers and grandmothers might ask the same question). If so, what are the implications for organizations or management or the entertainment industry?
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