MT - an article for Knowen Blog
MT - my thoughts about the articles from "Knowen Blog"
Product, Tool, and Utility
A good product requires appropriate business model. A good tool must have high utility for the users and the value appeal for creators. Wikipedia is a public tool. MindMeister is a popular commercial product among a large variety of collaborative and mind-mapping tools. While "winner takes all" is frequently true, what is a good place for Knowen with these established tools and products created in the Web 1.0? Since Wikipedia is very well established, it only makes sense to build the next phase given that "the winner took it all" at the current phase.
And then there is Google Search, very dominant and powerful product.
An appealing opinion is that we are (still) facing "the computing deployment phase", which is typical for massive technological revolutions. If so, after one or two crashes, another wave of capital and refactoring of software tools and products might as well happen.
MindMeister and Knowen are visually appealing in representing the knowledge connections. Structured and hierarchical view of the world around us has been argued convincingly, and the graphical representation by trees, networks, and mind maps is natural. Yet there is a conceptual question of how to distinguish between intra-layer and inter-layer structures in a "model-independent way".
Venture Capitalists like to talk about product-market fit. Wikipedia and open-source software libraries are extremely valuable tools, which have a right product-consumers fit without explicit commercial business model. MindMeister and Google Search are commercial products, which also found their great product-market fits. What are the next products and tools with good product-market fit in the next wave of innovation in this space?
Refactoring of the traditional industries requires good tools. Software will continue to remove friction from the economies and the markets will appear in new places.
The capital will play a big role as argued by a16z for new marketplaces as well as argued very generally by Carlotte Perez.
open-source collaborative tools versus commercial products in the context of the trade wars? the progress does require broad consensus.
convenience and design must help to deal with the vast amount of information and knowledge
more speculatively, for crypto-consensus afficionados - Economic web for people needs a new discovery model beyond Google Search, as Google Search was a breakthrough discovery model itself, which replaced a naive "directory search" and being the fastest search engine (while only 13th on the market) by far (and still?).