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I recently read Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat," one of those books I bought a long time ago, but never had time to read. I am an admirer of Friedman who is a writer at the “NY Times”; frequent guest speaker on shows I like, such as "Meet The Press"; and book author. It impresses me that he is considered an expert on both the Middle East political situation and on the competitive advantage of nations. Many of you are probably familiar with the premise of the book where he argues that recent advances in technology (primarily networks, but also software) have allowed developing nations (eg: India) to gain competitive advantage on a myriad of newly commoditized business processes, such as software testing and tax preparation. He is basically telling the comparative advantage story as is taught in most macro-economics classes and is sometimes heard on the campaign trails of politicians, but is talking about it in the context of how the very recent technology shift has facilitated a rapid comparative advantage shift. The book puts fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the hearts and minds of the American or European reader who naturally thinks about his profession and how it could be broken down into a commodizable business process and outsourced to technically astute low-cost laborers in another country. The point I think Friedman missed in his book was how the pervasiveness of high speed networks and the improved search engines have opened up a massive opportunity for niche providers of innovative goods, services, and information in developed economies who can now be "found" by people shopping for those products across the internet. Yesterday’s Boston Globe had an article entitled "The Meganiche" which talks about how even razor thin slices of markets on the internet can represent over a million users, which is one tenth of one percent of all internet users. The meganiche phenomenon is particularly interesting in my mind for small business owners. Most small businesses we talk with sell niche products, information, or services to people through word of mouth (rolodexes and one degree of separation removed from those rolodexes). The great thing about owning a small business today versus ten years ago is that you can leverage the power of the internet to enable shoppers in your meganiche to "find" you by doing smart things around content creation, custom landing pages, and search engine optimization.
Posted by Brian Halligan on Tue, Nov 14, 2006 @ 11:24 AM
posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 at 1:56 PM by Andrew Mahon
posted on Saturday, November 18, 2006 at 1:06 PM by Brian Halligan
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