The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [3]
Mobile computing, enabled by GPS, WiFi, 3G, and Bluetooth, is growing at an explosive rate, and is expected to overtake desktop computing within only a few years. What’s more, the game-changing expansion of Web-enabled mobile networks has converged with the explosion of social ones. Each reinforces the other. Within a historical eye-blink, we have constructed a whole new language of sharing. You text, poke, and tweet your friends to meet at the pub you chose on Yelp, and then share the evening’s goofy photos on Facebook the hungover morning after. Awesome.
Something else has changed, too. The credit and spending binge that crashed the economy has left us with a different kind of hangover. We’re increasingly conscious of how we’ve raced through our personal and environmental assets. We’re forced to rethink what we care about. Throughout the world, we are reconsidering how we relate to the things in our lives and what we want from our businesses and communities. We need a way to get the goods and services we actually want and need, but at less cost, both personal and environmental. Fortunately, we’re quickly gaining more power to do so.
For now, most companies stubbornly stick to various twists on a single tried-and-true formula: Create a product or service, sell it, and collect money. Just sell the guy a lawn mower and watch him walk out the door. Few businesspeople, including most entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, have imagined creating wealth any other way. Though they may use social media to market their products, their minds are still stuck in a 2-D buyer/ seller/own-it world.
Around these entrenched businesses, a new model is starting to take root and grow, one in which consumers have more choices, more tools, more information, and more power to guide those choices. I call this emerging model “The Mesh.” In recent years,thousands of Mesh businesses have been created and scaled up, a few into well-known brands. These businesses understand and cleverly exploit the perfect storm of mobile, location-based capabilities, Web and social network growth, changing consumer attitudes, and the historically understood market benefits of share platforms. In this book, I’ll explore the ideas that underlie the myriad forms of the Mesh, and why it conveys extraordinary competitive advantages to entrepreneurs and businesses.
Fundamentally, the Mesh is based on network-enabled sharing—on access rather than ownership. The central strategy is, in effect, to “sell” the same product multiple times. Multiple sales multiply profits, and customer contact. Multiple contacts multiply opportunity—for additional sales, for strengthening a brand, for improving a competitive service, and for deepening and extending the relationship with customers. Using sophisticated information systems, the Mesh also deploys physical assets more efficiently. That boosts the bottom line, with the added advantage of lowering pressure on natural resources. Not always and not for everything, but a Mesh network that manages shared transactions has the growing capacity to soar past a company that sells something once to one owner. All of us reap the rewards of dramatically improved service and choice at a lower personal cost.
This has been my life’s work: how to get more real value for people by leveraging the Web as a sharing platform. In 1993, I had the terrific good fortune to work with Dale Dougherty and Tim O’Reilly in creating GNN, the first commercial Web site. We designed the first online transaction and ran the first ads on the Web. We helped unleash the Internet revolution, which uprooted and reconfigured most major industries and business models, displaced leading brands, and forced the redesign of hundreds of key products. We sold GNN to AOL.
A few years later, I saw a very young boy at O’Hare mimicking taking a photograph with his fingers. Instead of holding his “viewfinder” up to his eye, he held it out in front, like a view screen. There it was. Digital images were clearly the future. Using the Web, here was an opportunity to turn the