E-Business I Book review

Blur: the speed of change in the connected economy

Blur is a book providing us with a new framework for understanding how traditional business boundaries are dissolving and transaction volumes are breaking the speed barrier. The essence of the book can be illustrated using one simple formula:

Speed x Connectivity x Intangibles = Blur

Davis and Meyer, authors of the book, argued that, the three forces listed on the left side of the formula, the trinity of the blur, have been driving the change of economy:

The trinity of the blur

· Speed: Every aspect of business and the connected organization operates and changes in real time. For example, almost instantaneous communication and computation are shrinking time and focusing us on speed.

· Connectivity: Everything is becoming electronically connected to everything else: products, people, companies, countries, everything. The connectivity has led to “the death of distance,” a shrinking of space.

· Intangibles: Every offer has both tangible and intangible economic value. The intangible is growing faster. Service and information is growing explosively, reducing the importance of tangible mass.

The Blur Economy

The blur economy has three basic parts:

• The blur of desires—the demand side of an economy—where products and services meld into one to become an offer, and where the roles of buyers and sellers merge into an exchange.

• The blur of fulfillment, where strategies and organizations dissolve into economic webs and permeable relationships

• The blur of resources, where people are no longer divided into their working and consuming selves, and where capital is more often a liability than an asset. These resources are shaking off their traditional meanings as vigorously as a dog shakes off water after climbing out of a lake.

Conclusion

In the Blur world, products and services are merging. Buyers sell and sellers buy. Neat value chains are messy economic webs. Homes are offices. No longer is there a clear line between structure and process, owning and using, knowing and learning, real and virtual. Less and less separates employee and employer. In the world of capital, value moves so fast that you cannot tell stock from flow. On very front, opposites are blurring.