Just a thought from me, but isn’t that Wisdom of Crowds simply… if you get enough people to discuss something at some point it will average out at the right answer? Wisdom of Crowds should have been a one pager called: “The Wisdom of Crowds – take the mean of a large group and its more likely to be right than the mean of a small group”
Alot has been made of the Wisdom of Crowds. From Derren Brown to James Surowiecki, we cling on to the hope that the “many are more powerful” than the few. I’m no scientist but to me the fact that you can get 1,000 people into a room, and they are more likely to get an answer than 10 people of similar quality doesn’t astound me.
Blink is another book which I feel could have also been resolved in one page… which would have said “Blink. You should go with your first instinct”.
I have been avidly reading NYT’s coverage of the NetFlix $1m competition. If you don’t know anything about this, NetFlix hosted a competition to create an improvement in its service.. the prize $1m. The team winners were a 7 man team, who had exactly the same response as the second place losers….except they delivered it 20mins earlier. As the article points out, that is a very expensive 20mins. ($50k per minute)
The good news for all your losers out there, is that these losers have come up trumps. The team from Opera have managed to drum up an additional $10m worth of business directly from the learnings they discovered in the NetFlix process.
I’m sure this isn’t what they originally hoped when they entered but its quite an interesting way of thinking. e.g. Let’s enter this competition and see what learnings we can take from it. If we win great, if we don’t great.
I also wonder how many of these competitions we might see cropping up. Building improvements to eBay’s auction model, Facebook sourcing a new platform design from within its community, the list could go on and on. Perhaps we might even see Craigslist redesigned by someone who has got work through the classified board.
Either way its a nice story to bring a close to a Wednesday workday…
