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

243 Pages·2014·1.41 MB·English

by  Steve Sammartino

THE GREAT FRAGMENTATION
and why the future of business is
small
STEVE SAMMARTINO
First published in 2014 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
42 McDougall St, Milton Qld 4064
Office also in Melbourne © Steve Sammartino 2014
The moral rights of the author have been asserted National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication
data:
Author: Sammartino, Steve, author.
Title: The Great Fragmentation : why the future of business is small / Steve Sammartino.
ISBN: 9780730312680 (pbk)
9780730312703 (ebook)
Notes: Includes index.
Subjects: Business enterprises.
Information technology.
Information society.
Dewey Number: 658.4062
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair
dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written
permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher at the address above.
Cover design by Wiley
Cover image © iStock.com/ pavlen
Disclaimer
The material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and neither purports nor intends to
be advice. Readers should not act on the basis of any matter in this publication without considering (and if
appropriate, taking) professional advice with due regard to their own particular circumstances. The author
and publisher expressly disclaim all and any liability to any person, whether a purchaser of this publication
or not, in respect of anything and of the consequences of anything done or omitted to be done by any such
person in reliance, whether whole or partial, upon the whole or any part of the contents of this publication.
CONTENTS
Preface
About the Author
Chapter 1: The industrial deal: the shift from industry to technology
Terms and conditions
Unlearning
A new business infrastructure
The 4Ps
Chapter 2: A global revolution: industrial leapfrog
Beyond the fortunate few
The multi-generational shift
Changing habits
Lifetime employment
From employees to projecteers
Industrial education
Startup culture
The truth about competitors
Notes
Chapter 3: The social reality: beyond the surface of social media
It’s permanent
Digital conversations = collective sentience
Social media as an industrial-system protest
Network diffusion
Soul-crushing corporations
Notes
Chapter 4: Life in boxes: the industrial formula for living
Parasocial interaction
The homo sapiens operating system
Dunbar’s number
Enemy territory?
Digital clustering
Virtual is real
IRL vs AFK
Virtual is the physical preamble
Let’s go surfing
Digital replicates physical
There is no ‘digital’
What’s your electricity strategy?
The market doesn’t care when you finished school
Getting your digital on
It’s not my job
Welcome to med school
Note
Chapter 5: Rehumanisation: words define our future
Dead-end products
A future of unfinished products
The malleable marketplace
Corporate skulduggery?
Outsourcing logic
The end of bison hunting
The tastemakers
The selfish era
So how do we survive?
Creative types
Collaboration, creative orientation and counter intuition
Note
Chapter 6: Demographics is history: moving on from predictive marketing
How to get profiled
The price of pop culture
The best average
The weapon of choice
Don’t fence me in
How do you define a teenager?
Stealing music or connecting?
Marketing 1.0
Marketing revised
The new intersection
Social + interests = intention
The story of cities
Do I know you?
The interest graph in action
The anti-demographic recommendation engine
Chapter 7: The truth about pricing: technology and omnipresent deflation
Technology deflation
Real-world technology deflation
The free super computer
The crux is human
It’s getting quicker
Technology curve jumping
Technology stacking
Omnipresent deflation
Consumer price index trickery
Connections and the impact on prices
Economic border hopping
The new minimum wage
Notes
Chapter 8: A zero-barrier world: how access to knowledge is breaking down
barriers
So what’s changed?
Why do we even own stuff?
The sharing economy
Personal access
Physical access
Ownership is a mental state
Commercial access
Access to everything
A personal global factory
The clothing company
The two-way street
The laptop corporation
Chapter 9: The infinite store: rebooting retail
The physical and virtual challenges
Retail was easy
The retail revolution
What retail forgot
The discount death spiral
Price and range equalise
Same brand, different plan
The questions that matter
Selling online
If you make, you retail (big and small)
Border hopping and digital reinvention
Experience > item
Clues in coffee culture
Chapter 10: Bigger than the internet: 3D printing
A virtual physical reality
The history of technology repeats
The home factory
Piracy on steroids
Dad vs daughter
Notes
Chapter 11: Screen play: post–mass media
Television is no more
Device convergence
Digital demarcation
Mass-media platform fragmentation
The legacy media challenge
Blogs vs The New York Times
Who do you trust?
Screen first
Media then/media now
Platforms on platforms
How to live in niche land
People don’t have average interests
Channelology
The price of attention
Channelling an audience
This ain’t no Super Bowl
Fill the channel void
The easiest way to get attention
Curation
We’re all media companies
We’re all nodes
On the fast track to amazing
Subscription television is doomed
On-demand subscription
We don’t want your packaged deal
The usability gap
In-home demos
Demographics to the people
Screens and cave walls
Advice from a pirate
The content producers forgot
Winners and losers
Chapter 12: Too big to fail?: the great financial disruption
Their own private Napster
They lost the most important asset
So what do banks actually do?
It’s virtual and data driven
The leaky bucket
Circumventing banks
What is currency?
Digital and crypto currencies
It’s just another technology stack
Why should banks care?
Unstable yet permanent
Crowdfunding
Redefining decision authority
Unearthed economic value
Don’t expect a rush on the banks
Do expect marginalisation
Chapter 13: The 3-phase shift: a closer look at the web
The phases
Evolution at warp speed
Inventing and stealing time
Immature technology
The web of things
It’s already begun
Will everything be connected?
Then what?
What’s first?
The physical mash-up
If-this-then-that living
Ambient sharing
Notes
Chapter 14: The big game: an introduction to gamification
Child’s play
Digital game grooming
More than a niche
Games are for nerds, right?
Friday night lights
Yes, but it’s different
Emotions + incentive = shaped behaviour
People won’t share that stuff
Bursting into reality
Rising realism
Doing > having
The gaming mentality
The sixth sense
Our decentralised nervous system
Start making sense
Product = computer
Mash-up heaven
The seed is planted
Not if, but when and who
Chapter 15: System hacking: a great idea with a bad reputation
Hacking defined
Hacker culture
Hacking is inevitable
Retail hacking