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| Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything | 
 enlarge | Authors: Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $7.30
You Save: $20.65 (74%)
New (55) Used (12) Collectible (1) from $7.30
Avg. Customer Rating:  93 reviews
Sales Rank: 10555
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Expanded
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 1591841933
Dewey Decimal Number: 658
EAN: 9781591841937
ASIN: 1591841933
Publication Date: April 17, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Book and dust cover fine condition. Remainder mark at edge
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| Customer Reviews:
 Social networking is a reaility - now how to use it. June 5, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I recently read a book called, Wikonomics - how mass colaboration changes everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. It is a book about the social networking and collaborative sites that are becoming very popular. I found the book highly interesting since I try to follow trends and try to figure out what opportunities are available in which trends.
Wikonomics points out that many times traditional business is afraid of open source projects like Linux and Wikopedia but others see a corneacopia of participation and economy. The thesis behind the book is that the collaborative social networking type sites actually increase business opportunity and do not take away business opportunity.
The book had a number of possible subtitles including:
Edit This Book!
The Dividends of Collective Genius
We the People
Business (The Remix)
The new World of Collaborative Anarchy
Please Register to Participate
The Power of Us
Creating a New page in Business History
Unleashing Our Collective Genuis
This Book is a Stub
Harnessing the Power of Your Peers
(Your Input Needed Here)
Peer-Powered Prfit in Life, Business, and Individual Choice
The Peer Advantage: Myth or Magic?
Peer Producing the Future
The subtitles describe what the phenomenon is.
The book talks about the 4 principles of Wikonomics including being open. This flies in the face of some businesses which often try to keep their secrets to themselves.
Peering: most organizations have a higher archaric set up and the nature of Wikis is they are based on peer.
Sharing: again a conventional western society says, keep it to yourself.
Acting Globally: Wikies are a great way to get global knowledge working together.
It is a good book and a fairly quick read; fairly inspirational; however, I am still not sure what to do with it. Thinking...
 Future Shock 2.0 October 14, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Reading this 2006 book made me feel alternately like Christopher Columbus and Grandpa Simpson. Co-authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams define a near-term future of breathtaking wonder and innovation, yet I came away finding their best-case scenario hard to swallow.
"Wikinomics" describes existing business models in various industries, from which it extrapolates their ongoing development as part of a larger revolution of revolutionary openness, "on par with the Italian renaissance or the rise of Athenian democracy," the authors write. "Mass collaboration across borders, disciplines, and cultures is at once economical and enjoyable."
Like a lot of other posted reviewers here, I found "Wikinomics" too gushy and jargony, throwing up random-sounding words like "ideagoras" and "prosumers" as if their very existence connoted concreteness of often-fuzzy notions. The book's airy dismissal of copyright law and the protection of intellectual property rights as old thinking annoyed me immensely. And the notion of a future of non-hierarchal business enterprises strikes me as a terribly naive misreading of the most important aspect of the equation: the human element.
But give Tapscott and Williams points for presenting their case for futurism in a way that often feels quite compelling. They start with perhaps the best such example, by presenting the case of a Canadian mining company that, stymied in their search for gold, opened their records up to the outside world through online file sharing, soliciting ideas about where in their vast mine network they should dig for rich veins. The resulting influx of new thinking catapulted Goldcorp from a $100 million company to one worth $9 billion.
Tapscott and Williams take the success of Goldcorp and look for other industries where similar ideas have been practiced with similar results. With some, like this website, the fruits of innovation are immediate and obvious. With others, like old-guard conglomerate Procter & Gamble, success has been nearly as profound in more subtle ways.
The authors score some points, but also spout a lot of obvious Panglossian hyperbole. Wikipedia is as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica (better check that with John Seigenthaler). The youth-oriented website TakingITGlobal is like a new United Nations in embryonic form.
But their viewpoint has obvious value, too, and applicability in the world around us, even beyond the net world from which "Wikinomics" springs. Looking at the reinvention of BestBuy through its acquisition of Geek Squad, or how the workplace itself is changing shape to adapt to faster-moving, less-centralized structuring, is "Wikinomics" at its most challenging, and best reading.
I didn't put down this book convinced I saw the future, let alone a good future. But I did feel myself thinking differently about life and work than when I first picked "Wikinomics" up. Maybe that's the point.
 frigthening February 10, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
It is frightening that such shallow pamphlet style writing claims to bring forward innovative ideas just by going on and on with redundant phrases, mixing them with rather rare mention of interesting facts and figures and neglecting simple core questions of economy.
the authors claim that the book is working along the lines of what it claims to be characteristic for what it analysis, i.e. openness, cooperation ... . If the quality of the book is similar to the quality of wikinomics-outcomes in general, a dark future looms up at the horizon: shallow, a rosy air bubble that will leave as many victims as crashing twin-towers.
Get On Board February 2, 2007
3 out of 18 found this review helpful
An excellent look at the future and I recommend everyone note the wisdom of the words and get on board. If you do not you will be left standing on the platform as the train departs.
Fascinating ideas but quite repetitious in their presentation March 21, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Tapscott and Williams present the idea of collaborative work on the Internet, by now pretty well known through Wikipedia and other similar ventures, as the key to business success. This is not a Malcolm Gladwell-style once-over treatment but a serious look at what some major corporations like Procter & Gamble or IBM have done to expand their boundaries, increase human knowledge, and make a profit.
This book is definitely worth reading. However, the authors do tend to be quite repetitious, and they sometimes make overly broad generalizations: "Today young people are authorities on the digital revolution that is changing every institution in society." Young people definitely use Wikipedia, messaging, MySpace, and so on, but people of various ages are authorities in the traditional sense. Or, "new communication technologies render paper-based publishing obsolete." Not yet in most fields of human endeavor.
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