Blown to Bits

"Information and the mechanisms for delivering it are the glue that holds together the structure of businesses."

"Digital networks finally make it possible to blow up the link between rich information and its physical carrier."

"As the trade-off between richness and reach blows up, economic relationships, in all their manifestations, will change radically."

"As value chains deconstruct, they will fragment into multiple businesses that have separate sources of competitive advantage."

"The winners in this new game of disintermediation will be the players who are good at one thing, or more precisely, the smaller number of things that define advantage in a deconstructed business definition."

"Once the richness/reach trade-off is blown up, suppliers, incumbent retailers, and new players compete against each other to own, or at least divide up, the consumer relationship."

"Product suppliers and traditional retailers alike fear the rise of the agent navigator who facilitates broad-reaching comparisons without even being party to the transaction."

""Affiliation" does not mean caring for the customer: any supplier, retailer, or navigator has to do that."

"Many seller-based navigators will survive for a long time, not because of clever defensive strategies, but because no consumer-affiliated navigator has the will and resources to mount a successful attack."

"Product suppliers can use richness to create value from a direct relationship with the consumer: not the pseudo-value of much current marketing communication, but real value based on a rich and voluntary exhange of information."

"The core asset of the segment-of-one strategy, the customer information file, provides the greatest competitive opportunity, not for the seller, but for the consumer."

"A brand is nothing but rich, product-specific information acquired, retained, and believed by the consumer independent of any particular act of consumption."

"The winners will be bold strategists who build the right coalitions and commit a sufficient level of resources to standards-based strategies that happen to succeed."

"Because large numbers of employees cannot communicate richly and directly with one another, the traditional organization has layers of middle managers switching information up and down and across the organization."

"There is now a robust "market for corporate control," and any management that fails to extract from a corporation its maximum value is vulnerable to summary displacement."

"The organization builds competitive advantage not from what it is or does, but from how it reviews, learns from, and then amends its own procedures and structure."

"Deconstruction is not a new set of rules about strategy; it is an argument that all the old rules of strategy apply, but at a much finer level of granularity."