Commodities of the New Economy (Page 6 of 6)
Summary
It is clear that the new economy runs on new commodities. Power, CPU
power, storage, and bandwidth are as important to the new economy as
oil, gold, and lumber were to the previous ones. While these new
commodities are not currently traded like the old ones, it is likely
that the new commodities will begat new ways to buy sell themselves.
By overlying a set of accepted industry standards that facilitate the
movement of information and processes, these seminal elements of the
new economy can be bought and sold as commodities, and the pricing of
those commodities in fact determines the health of the new economy.
By recognizing that these commodities are at the heart of the massive
virtualization of businesses and organizations, insights into how to
monetize assets and activities emerges. Historically, businesses have
been bounded by "where" they could locate. Now business can locate
places where they have access to the commodities, which often times
will have little relationship to any specific physical location. As
the new economy continues to emerge, fixed real estate assets may
become one of the least attractive assets to possess or in which to
invest.
The emergence of a new set of commodities forces a fundamental
reconsideration of the assumptions at the base of many businesses
and business models. A global communications infrastructure that
allows work, information, and applications to be spread around the
world, without chronological limitations, represents a massive
inflection point in history. Businesses can never really be closed.
For any business currently operating in this environment, the
challenge becomes figuring out how to apply these commodities in
unique ways and to recreate the world in to its advantage, as
opposed to responding to the world created by its competitors.
Part 1 - Commodities of the New Economy
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