"When Companies Do The Mash" ponders BusinessWeek, software development is done more quickly and cheaply using off-the-shelf components, but many companies aren't doing it. As BusinessWeek describes it, mash-ups could be viewed as replacements for offshoring of tech dev.
"Mash-ups as product" make sense to me, that is, products to be purchased shrink-wrapped or custom-ordered by corporations from vendors.
But mash-up products are the result of mash-up processes. Those processes are something few corporations can do. It's a cultural thing.
Companies also result from mash-ups. The process of creating a start-up is often a mash-up in which technology is but one component, where prototypes of businesses are quickly assembled, disassembled, smashed, tweaked, and smushed together in an improvisational collage whose ingredients can include economic unit analysis, human capital, money, customer needs, infrastructure and entrepreneurial passion.
This flies in the face of corporate hierarchy, tradition and education.
The whole idea of synergy is related to mash-ups. Putting
magazines, cable, Internet and Hollywood together is a great idea IF a culture were designed to support creatively-oriented accidents that could eventually result in an entirely new corporate model obsessively focused on addressing known and unknown customer needs. But I guess it might not then be a Corporation. It would be a mash-up.
It is also at the heart of capitalism. One of its flavors was known as Creative Destruction.
Mash-ups. It's how we do what we do.
Recent Comments