Why Buy the Cow?

At long last, Cisco Press has published Why Buy the Cow? How the On-Demand Revolution Powers the New Knowledge Economy and our book is now up on Amazon. Subrah Iyar, the co-founder of WebEx details the "rise of software as a service (SaaS), web collaboration, the changing role knowledge workers and the new opportunities web 2.0 technologies are creating." Read the introduction and first chapter online.

Unfortunately, you can't read the best chapter online, "The Tao of Disruption and Innovation," in which Dave Snowden and I muse about how technology innovation can also be disrupted itself —making the process tricky to predict or control. However, you can read most of it on Google book search here. (Why buy the cow, eh?)

Many businesses think their product and marketing strategies alone will determine success or failure; but in their enthusiasm, they almost never consider how many ways that even markets can suddenly appear or disappear. With this in mind, this chapter offers some observations about issues that executives and managers might consider to position themselves to surf waves of disruptive innovation in light of the fact that predicted paths will themselves be disrupted. To do this requires a look at how technologies evolve and also how individual and social practices of knowledge work evolve in a future that is more complex.

Why Buy the Cow? was edited by Cindy Gordon and Heidi Collins and features contributions by Bill Ives and others. Home page for the book is here.