Selling to David

How will the Information Revolution change the nature of business?

Edward B. Driscoll Jr. examines the predictions of Instapundit and law professor Glenn Reynolds.

An excerpt:

Increasingly, the businesses that are most successful are those that benefit other, much smaller businesses, even down to sole proprietors. Certainly, that's the case with UPS and FedEx, office supply chains such as Staples and OfficeMax, and employee-hiring outfits such as Manpower, Inc., and Monster.com.

"I think the way that you make it in the 21st century is going to be figuring out a way to help a lot of people do what they want, rather than as in the 20th century, trying to figure out a way to make them do what you want."

That's especially the case with eBay, which warrants several mentions in An Army of Davids. Reynolds says that "eBay lets lots of little guys make it, and they're able to make it while they're little, because eBay is big. And it does sort of replace a lot of the old big business infrastructure. It replaces it, but it doesn't abolish it: it provides a lot of the same services. You talk about disintermediation, but eBay tends to re-intermediate by providing a trusted framework for buyers and sellers to get together, by making it easy to find what you want -- and among other things, by providing health benefits. And that's a fairly dramatic thing. Those are the kinds of things that whole offices used to do.

Read it all here.