Dispersed
From an article in Backbone, a tech mag produced by Toronto’s Globe & Mail.
Loren Hicks, a Toronto-based independent management consultant, says that the fact that Microsoft’s browser updates will now come faster to market still doesn’t compete with a community-based product like Firefox.
“The key constraint on software development is not money, but brainpower. No matter how well funded, a command-and-control organization will never be able to compete on product quality against a widely dispersed open community. You can’t buy innovation or unbiased peer-review.”
The Sun Tzu principle of shih, which provides the backbone of our book, The Rules of Victory, depicts the world more like a game of Go—complex, multi-dimensional, ever-shifting, and interdependent—than a game of checkers, which is more of a straight-out slugging match. As such, it lends itself much more readily to working “widely dispersed open communities” rather than command-and-control situations.
James Gimian & Barry Boyce