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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Change your life from piles of "stuff"- to sharing on "the Mesh", September 23, 2010
This review is from: The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing (Hardcover)
The key idea in this book is that we are changing from owning piles of products (and services) to sharing them and using them only when needed. Out here in San Francisco, where many folks use public transportation for commuting and shopping, few need to own a car. So, there's ZipCar, where you can "own" a car for a few days a month, on a "as needed basis". The author also uses Netflix as an example- but of course we have been renting videos and DVD's for quite some time before that company- there's rarely a need to keep an extensive and expensive video library at home. As the author says "The Mesh difference is that with GPS-enabled mobile web devices and social networks, physical goods are now easily located in space and time. It has become very convenient to find a ride back from your meeting with someone heading to your neighborhood, or get a great deal for drinks close by, or locate an available home in a home exchange while traveling, or discover a new "popup gallery" near the dinner you're attending." Other examples of course include the classic "timeshare"- condos. In fact I just stayed at one during a rather nice trip to Disneyworld. It was lovely and worked perfectly for us. Gansky argues against the modern American "throwaway culture" and shows us that "The Mesh" will bring in more products that are "Durable, flexible, reparable and sustainable." " "When stuff became cheap, and then credit became cheap, we filled our lives with stuff - not the things we really care about. " This is a fascinating concept and very cutting edge. What I found interesting is that it really sounds so obvious once the author points it out, and I agree we are headed that way more and more. The book also contains more than 50 pages of "Mesh" businesses and references, and even more at the book's/author webpage. This is Lisa's first book, she was the founder of several internet companies and is a well known entrepreneur.
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49 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must read insight for anyone interested in the future of online, of commerce or even culture, September 23, 2010
This review is from: The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing (Hardcover)
In this painstakingly researched fun to read book (how often do those two go together) Gansky has outlined a trend that's been around but often overlooked. The internet has turbocharged our ability to share. It's created a platform for business models based on community use of expensive objects and services. It'll take an hour to get her point, and then you'll see it over and over, everywhere you look. Wow.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Looking for a way to do business with urban white people? Look no further, February 28, 2011
I should feel bad saying negative things about this book considering I got it for free from a Seth Godin pre-order, but... Gansky obviously knows a thing or two about starting businesses. No question. She has done it before and she'll do it again no doubt. The thing is, her big idea doesn't go quite as far as she wants it to, or as she wants you to think it will. The big idea: if you can find a way to monetize having people share, you'll be able to open new business opportunities. She's got some insights: the idea of a baby clothes exchange definitely shows that sharing-based models aren't just limited to big-ticket items. But she overextends by suggesting that any type of business will be able to work this way. I would imagine that if you live in rural North Dakota on a farm, you can't exactly share your harvester in a Zipcar kind of network. You need it at exactly the same time as your neighbors. And I don't care how many shirt-sharing services you can think of, there's just no way I'm sharing shoes or underwear, and I'm sure I'm not alone. I am always more impressed when a book acknowledges the limits of its hypotheses. If you read this book, there's no reason everything can't work with sharing. If you think about the world, you know that can't be true. There's also something so very "farmer's market" about starting a web-based business based upon sharing. There's nothing new about sharing. Rural communities have done it for years. I made the harvester/Zipcar example for a reason: rural communities have *always* shared big-ticket items and purchses. They've just never made it a business. Barn raising, crop harvesting, etc. aren't at all new and noteworthy and Gansky doesn't talk about them. Why not? My theory: because they don't send the right semiotic. There's nothing hip about them, because urban hipsters don't raise barns or harvest crops. Extended families have shared clothing for hundreds of years but there's two differences between that and what Gansky praises: (1) these people all know each other so there's no need for the Internet to help put them together, and (2) no one charges anyone any money, so there's nothing new-economy about it. I'll also acknowledge that I may be wrong. For example, Best Buy has just started (as of this review date: February 2011) a program where you can agree that when you buy your electronics, you can bring them back when you're done and get trade-in. But I see this as more of a vendor lock-in, less of a true sharing service (they haven't started a service to allow you to buy the used products when they come back, for example). If they go that extra mile, that starts to parallel the hope Gansky has here about Walmart starting a sharing-based business. Time will tell. But at the end of the day, I look at this book as being an interesting but flawed hypothesis. More limited in scope, it would have stood up to investigation. But because it overreaches, it falls.
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