Day: 3 July 2006

In the late 1990s as B2B exchanges proliferated wildly, we saw the term “butterfly market” gain immense popularity; it was used to describe a market where very large numbers of buyers and sellers congregated.

Ross Mayfield pointed me at a very interesting paper on How Not to Build an Online Market, well worth a read. You can follow the links from Ross’s post on the subject, to be found here.

There were large numbers of buyers and of sellers, but they weren’t buying or selling large numbers of the same thing.

If there was anything they had in common, it was trust. If there was anything to keep them together, it was trust. They related to each other.

So a butterfly market was in itself an aggregation of narrower smaller markets, an aggregation of relationships and conversations. Not one market but many. And any attempt to make one homogeneous market out of them failed.

Yesterday I quoted extensively from Drucker, labouring his point that we no longer have unique technologies for a given industry, nor unique end uses for a given product or service.

This is important to bear in mind when we look at Four Pillars.

We should not constrain the tools we have, nor constrain the tools we have yet to see, by placing anchoring and framing qualifiers before the word “tool”, or by appending the word “tool” to Pillars.
Search is a meaningful term. Tool is a meaningful term. But search tool runs the risk of constraining our thinking.

Over the last year or so, I have regularly used blogs to initiate searches via conversation. [Today, after many years of looking, I found out that Big Mo was Moe Norman, see earlier post and comments. ]

There have been many occasions when I have used search to refine or cleanse information.

Wikis can be very useful for structured note-taking, a graphics-free mind map tool of sorts.

At conferences I use blog software to make my own notes, save links and even comment on things, without any real intention to use that material in situ as a post.

Even if I do use parts of the material later.

The point is to allow the tools to have as much value as possible, and this can’t be done if we pigeonhole them too early.

One of my favourite Fowler quotes is “All right is quite right; quite right is all right; but quite all right is all quite wrong.”

And that’s the way I look at these terms in Four Pillars. Search is all right; Tool is quite right; but Search Tool is all quite wrong.