Las ventajas de los proyectos colaborativos
Posted: octubre 14th, 2008 | Author: Sergio Pérez Conde | Filed under: Análisis de entornos y mercados | Tags: comunidades, distribución de contenidos, proyectos colaborativos, redes sociales, wikipedia | 1 Comment »Scott Cook explica las ventajas de los proyectos colaborativos -como la Wikipedia, YouTube o la mayoría de redes sociales- en The Contribution Revolution (HBR, Octubre 2008).
El negocio de esos proyectos basados en la distribución de contenidos creo que queda perfectamente definido en estas claves, pero es muy recomendable la lectura completa del artículo, en formato wiki:
- Cost advantage
What does Wikipedia pay the authors and editors of its articles? What does Facebook or MySpace pay those who painstakingly fill in and update the personal profiles that make the site so valuable? Nothing. These sites enjoy free “raw materials,” as users perform gratis work that companies typically have to pay for. People contribute for various reasons, some of them self-serving but all of them sufficient to make formal payment unnecessary.
- Scalability advantage
Inexpensive does not mean incomplete. Quite the opposite: The contributions of countless people can be aggregated into vast compilations that surpass traditional offerings. Wikipedia has 10 times as many articles as Encyclopaedia Britannica. Craigslist’s free classified advertising sites feature more than 30 million new offerings every month, and eBay’s virtual shelves feature 120 million items, many times more than any other store on the planet can offer. Such scale doesn’t require broad or deep contribution: Only a small percentage of users may contribute (about one user in 1,000 for Wikipedia) and active contributions may require little effort (as with Flickr, the photo-sharing site).
- Competitive advantage
Some contribution systems give companies a structural advantage over rivals because of network effects. That is, the more people who contribute to the system, the more useful it becomes, creating an upward spiral in which increasingly more people choose to use and contribute to it. Network effects once drove the winner-take-all market-share gains of Microsoft’s Windows; today, they propel the success of sites like Wikipedia and Facebook.
[...] Efecto colaborativo. Aquellos proyectos que consiguen transformar el sector, tienen la facilidad de recibir sin recompensa a cambio la colaboración de los usuarios. La Wikipedia es el mejor ejemplo. E incluso, su estrategia de comunicación se basa en eso. Su mensaje para las donaciones es tajante: “Wikipedia: Haciendo la vida más fácil”. [...]