SaaS Ecosystem

One of the great things about the current wave of innovation is that even when I don’t necessarily agree with someone, there’s always the possibility that the person I’m locking horns with could come up with something valuable I missed. Such is the case with this wonderful presentation by Marc Lehman, CEO of saasu.

For the cynics in the community, much of what Mark has to say will come across as idealistic. The reality is that much of what he has to say exists in one form or another. I suspect Google (and by extension the open source community) kicked off many of the ideas from which Mark draws inspiration with its ‘Do No Evil’ mantra. We all know what happened to that. Even so, there’s nothing to say that businesses should not emerge where the currency extends beyond or in part replaces conventional forms of reward. That’s what the attention economy is all about. Check what Hugh MacLeod is doing these days.

As I’ve said when asked by others, I’m happy to give away 80% of what I know, whether that’s a blog post, a guest post, a bit of code, a link to another web site, an introduction or the odd bit of advice. It costs me nothing other than a little courtesy,  a bit of time and a willingness to share. More to the point, that’s a conscious choice on my part.

Of course the wonderful world of software isn’t always like that. But then it depends on whom your economic masters are at the time.

As always, you can take what you want of this and leave the rest.

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Tagged as: Attention economy, google, Hugh MacLeod, Open source, Software as a service