Book Review: Wikinomics

A colleague of mine got all excited about an idea for our organization last year.

"We should have a wiki!!," he said. "It'll be a great way to gather and share a lot of information. And it'll solve a lot of problems for us." When I asked him exactly what problems it would help us with, he repeated "it'll solve a lot," with nothing more specific than that.

He met with some folks at the National Academy of Public Administration to discuss his idea, and one of the senior people there said, "You sound like a Wikinomics guy." "What's that?," asked my colleague. True to form for this particular fellow, he'd jumped into providing us answers to problems he couldn't identify, and along the way ignored the basic research that might have told him that someone got there before him.

Sadly, the authors of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything are similarly guilty.

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams offer up a good description of modern trends in information sharing and collaboration. They discuss many of the methods by which innovation and creativity are being supported by technology that makes it easier to share. Readers might find the book a little dated because it was written pre-iPhone and before the proliferation of Facebook apps, but it still provides some interesting discussion.

Unfortunately, it also provides a lot of cheerleading.

Tapscott and Williams quickly slide from describing a phenomenon and its implications to openly advocating new practices and dismissing the potential consequences as irrelevant. It's all right to take a position based on evidence and rational argument, but the book quickly devolves into hyperbole. Comparing song mixing mashups to the Renaissance is taking things a bit too far.

For example, the authors promote businesses opening up their intellectual property to their customers so they can tinker with it, but they ignore the the profit incentive that drove the original innovation. They castigate Apple for limiting the customization early iPhone users could perform on their phones and the company's unwillingness to provide support for hacked products. As the years since then have shown, of course, Apple has created a new model for customer innovation that was slowly in progress when this book was first written, something the authors seemed not to consider at the time. The Apple model further allows apps to be shared throughout their entire customer base, rather than simply among the "geek elite," which would be the likely result of the authors' recommendations.

Throughout the book there runs a belief that today's innovative kids, who need to be freed from the ties of intellectual property laws, will continue to adapt and adjust their consumer electronics now and forever. The authors never approach the question of what will happen when these kids grow up and have to deal with jobs, mortgages, and other responsibilities that will encroach on their innovation time. This perception that in the future everyone will innovate isn't backed up by any research, merely by opinion.

This is a problem throughout the book. Various claims remain unsupported by data. For instance, the authors claim that music companies should encourage mashups because they lead to higher music sales by their artists. Nowhere, though, do the authors offer any evidence to support that claim, evidence that a good doctoral student should be able to collect for a dissertation.

Once you ignore data and evidence it's easy to ignore the negative implications of what you're advocating. They largely ignore, for instance, the problem of bad information being injected into decision making by content providers who really don't know what they're talking about or worse, who are deliberately loading bad info into the system. Yes, they make the point that the Encyclopedia Britannica has as many errors as Wikipedia, but at the Encyclopedia, someone can get fired for that, a fate that doesn't befall the person at home voluntarily editing Wikipedia pages. What happens to science in this environment? Is "peer review" still worth anything when the reviewers aren't peers? The authors stick to the positives but ignore the negatives.

And that, ultimately, is what dooms this book. Their conclusions may very well be sound, they just might have the right answers, but by not taking a hard look at the positives and negatives there's no way to really know.

By only presenting one side of an issue while implying they've considered both sides, they present the reader with poorly developed arguments that sound good enough to be ok, arguments that many readers will accept and act upon without question.

Which sounds remarkably like the effect of their wikinomics model as a whole.