Tim O'Reilly explains what Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com have in common in Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com: The Power of the Real Time Enterprise:
If Google's key innovation with PageRank was to recognize that a link was a vote, which could be counted and measured to get better search results, so too, WalMart recognized early on that a purchase was a vote. Each company built real-time information systems to capture and respond to that vote. WalMart built a supply chain in which goods are automatically re-ordered as they go out the door, with algorithms based on rate of sale controlling the reorders. Google built a better search engine, in which pages that were "better linked" were given priority over the ones produced by pure keyword matches. They went on to build real-time systems to measure what John Battelle called the database of intentions, as expressed by people's queries and subsequent clickstream data, as well as an ad auction system that prices ads in real-time based on the predicted likelihood of the ad being clicked on.
Makes sense to me, but my favorite part is this:
Now put these three examples, Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama together, and ask yourself what they tell you about the future of business, military operations, or any large organization.
Sensing, processing, and responding (based on pre-built models of what matters, "the database of expectations," so to speak) is arguably the hallmark of living things. We're now starting to build computers that work the same way. And we're building enterprises around this new kind of sense-and-respond computing infrastructure. In this sense, you can argue that Microsoft's term "Live Software" is the best name yet for the kind of software-infused enterprise we're building.
It's essential to recognize that each of these systems is a hybrid human-machine system, in which human actions are part of the computational loop.
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