Digital Darwinism
I began reading Digital Darwinism with high hopes. I selected Evan Schwartz’ latest effort based on the popularity of Webonomics and based on the favorable reviews on various book-selling sites. To say I was disappointed would be a gross understatement.
Digital Darwinism begins where most recent e-commerce related books begin: with the now trite observation that the web represents a revolution of the likes the world has never before seen. He then follows the hackneyed path past the Lake of the Lost Business Models and the Cliffs of Terrifying Burn Rate. By the time I actually hit the first chapter I was yawning and wondering if Schwartz had bothered to waste his time crafting these paragraphs or whether he just went ahead and lifted them directly from other Internet books and magazine articles with a little wordsmithing for window dressing. I’m being conservative when I estimate that I had seen at least ½ of his examples cited previously.
Arriving at the first chapter with a seed of doubt but willing to give it a shot, I was pleased to find the chapter opened with an example company (Peapod) that I had seen used only once before. Before long, however, Schwartz had lost his way and introduced an example of an off-line company failing to meet customer needs (HoJo) to illustrate what can happen when you stop brand-building on the web. HoJo is not a web company and any parallel drawn between its situation and “what it takes to survive in the cutthroat web economy” is a grasp at straws.
Flipping the page to Chapter 2, I had to laugh. The chapter is entitled “Allow Your Prices to Fluctuate Freely with Supply and Demand.” An absolutely novel idea! Give Schwartz the Nobel Prize for Economics! Twenty-five pages later I found myself again confronted with Schwartz’ little grey box of web wisdom. This one contained peaches such as, “Just as certain toys are most valuable right before Christmas … some of your offerings may suddenly become hot stuff.” Forgive me Mr. Schwartz, but even the worst of all business people recognize that fact. And what, again, does that have to do with the web? It was then that it dawned on me that Schwartz likely had nothing new to say at all and that precious little of his work was web-related. I had a sinking feeling that I had spent a little more than $20 on the literary equivalent of snake oil.
Chapter 3 offered a brief respite from Economics 101 with a reasonably good look into affiliate marketing complete with pitfalls and actual mechanics. This chapter represented the sum total of the learning I derived from this book. The anecdotes relating to Viacom and Autodesk’s method of protecting their copyrighted material was interesting, web-related, and timely.
Unfortunately, any uptick Schwartz had created in Chapter 3 was quickly snuffed out in Chapters 4-7 as Schwartz offers us a look at some exciting new business models that will work on the web. Forgive my yawn, but I read books years ago (beginning with The Profit Zone, Slywotzky and Morrison, 1997) that outlined those business models and more and then outlined the impacts. Does anyone honestly not know Dell’s business model by now?
So, in summary, Schwartz did a masterful job of only one thing: taking the body of published work on business in general, repackaging it in the garb of a web survival handbook, and then tossing in an Epilogue relating the future of the Internet business arena to Darwinian Evolution. Poor Darwin.