Campbell Vertesi

I wrote this in my early twenties. It was the first real strategy position I ever took. The language is of its time and so are some of the examples, but the core observation has driven my work ever since: the digital world runs on abundance where the physical world runs on scarcity, and the strategies that stop fighting that current are the strategies that win. Twenty years later, building open platforms at enterprise scale, I see that insight proved over and over again.

"We can think of it as a sort of 'ocean current' on the Internet. No matter what sort of boat you have, you cannot fight it. A business that could sail with the current would be very successful indeed."

"On the Internet, everything is by nature abundant. Try as you might, you can't keep a single copy as just a single copy."

"These numbers go well beyond statistical significance. They overwhelmingly favor products developed through Open Source methods."

The full essay is preserved below as it was written in 2003. Every page is dated, because the argument and its examples belong to their moment.