Friday, October 16, 2015

Information as capital

One of the advantages of working for what is basically an information company (thought that's not really our product, it's how we make money), is that I get to meet some heavyweights in the information business. Today, HP set up a meeting between my group and Chris Surdak, author of Data Crush. If you're pinning your future on data architecture, it's a meeting you cancel everything else to get to.

Lots of interesting points made. I think the one that was most salient was the evolution of what constitutes wealth. Wealth here is used to connote power and influence, not simply a means of acquiring other things. For centuries, it was land. If you owned your own land, you were infinitely more enabled than those who merely worked the land for others. Wage earners had almost no opportunity to improve their status. Landowners did.

Then, a couple hundred years ago that changed to capital. Land was still a good thing, but if you wanted to move up, you needed capital. Now, that's changing again. Capital is fine, but the real power is in information. Control that and the rest will come. The barriers to entry are exceedingly low. A information gathering iPhone App can be written in a week. If you get people to use it, you are suddenly a player because you have their information (no, they're not stealing it; read the terms of use: you GAVE it to them).

Anyway, like just about everybody else who does this sort of thing for a living, I already knew all that. However, his examples of what is being done and how to do it really drove the point home. It was a bit of an eye-opener for me.

No, I'm not going to drop out of grad school and start an information company. I'm actually quite fine with not being a big player in this game. It is exciting though that my work is going right to the heart of the matter: how to actually get a decent answer back from all that information.

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