Everything is Miscellaneous

I've been reading David Weinberger's excellent* "Everything is Miscellaneous": here's a snippet.

"When business first began to take the web seriously, the talk was all about "disintermediation". The web would get rid of the people in the middle so customers could reach directly into product warehouses to get what they want. and, wherever a business process could be replaced by the equivalent of an ATM, it has happened: Customers now book plan tickets without consulting travel agents and buy music without physically thumbing through CD cases. But it's only happened where what appears to the business to be its "added value" turned out to be mere inefficiency in the customer's eyes. The products that got converted into commodities are the ones for which a business adds so little value that customers buy based primarily on price. But, in the miscellaneous world, information and even knowledge itself becomes commodified. And that is changing the most basic, defining characteristic: Who owns what." (my italics)

It's certainly worth spending a few minutes thinking about what aspects of your business look like added value to you but look like inefficiency, or even obstruction, to your customers. I've commented before that for all the value that is currently attributed to social networking, much of the value of digital is in fact derived from the antisocial. Insulating buyers from salespeople is a potentially valuable service, which may account to some extent for the early success of online travel, autos and property websites that kept at a distance travel agents, cars salesmen (TechCrunch) and realtors. Which is before we even get on to the self-service benefits of AdWords...

*Why do I apparently think every book I've read is really good? Because I only mention the ones I like here. Life's too short to spend slating books just because they didn't happen to appeal to me. Websites and business strategies though? That's an entirely different matter.