The Digital Economy
20th Anniversary Edition: Rethinking the Promise and the Peril of Networked Intelligence
It was the fall of 1994 when Don Tapscott released The Digital Economy — arguably the first best-selling book about the Internet. The book hit the charts quickly and lasted, for example 7 months on the BusinessWeek best sellers list.
The Digital Economy changed thinking about the Internet globally, and was translated into over two dozen languages. While everyone else was beginning to talk about “web sites” and dot coms, Tapscott argued correctly that the Internet would have a much deeper impact on the nature of corporations, government and every institution in society.
The book coined important terms today like networked intelligence, internetworked business, prosumption (turning consumers into producers), the molecularisation of the enterprise, dis-intermediation and its flipside re-intermediation. It was the first book to raise the writings of Nobel Prize economist Ronal Coase and key to understanding the meaning of the Net. Tapscott’s analysis was profound about how the Net changes everything from healthcare, manufacturing and travel, to education, government and the converging industries of content, computing and communications. His warnings of the coming challenges to privacy are prophetic and even today governments around the world are building and implementing their Digital Economy Strategy.
In this new edition, Tapscott updates the book with a sweeping new analysis of how the Net (as he called it then) has changing business and society in the last 20 years. He leaves the original text untouched for historical purposes and scrutiny, writing a dozen new sections placed in the context of two decades of transformation.
Anyone who cares about the promise and peril of the digital revolution on business and society will find this new edition enlightening.
McGraw-Hill; 2 edition (Oct 10, 2014)
