Google's Starfish

Posted on Dec 16, 2009

Reading “The Starfish and the Spider” now. The book is about how decentralized organizations and entities (the “starfish”) without clear hierarchy and leadership are equipped to defeat classic, centralized organizations (the “spider”). One of the first examples given in the book are the p2p music sharing sites that defeated the big record labels.
I immediately started thinking about the centralized giants of software and the internet, and who their “starfish” were.
So with Microsoft it’s easy: the Linux operating system is the starfish that “defeated” it.
What about Google (the web search / web advertisement spider) and Amazon (the online shopping spider)? Who (or “what”) is going to be their starfish? I think inventing that starfish will be quite interesting.