Yet never before have companies had such powerful technologies for interacting directly with customers, collecting and mining information about them, and tailoring their offerings accordingly. Information about customers consisted primarily of aggregate sales statistics augmented by marketing research data. This strategy may be more challenging for firms whose distribution channels own Harvard Business Review Cart My Account Downloads Explore Today on HBR Blogs Magazine Books Authors Store Harvard Business School

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I believe that the growing fiscal crisis of the state, and the growing tendency toward high unemployment and underemployment becoming a norm, will have two long-term results:  first, the production of a growing share of value in the informal economy in place of its purchase with wages; and second, the decoupling of the social safety net from both the welfare state and wage employment. The latter kind of architecture, as described by Kropotkin , was what prevailed in the networked free towns and villages of late medieval Europe.  Getting from here to there will involve a fundamental paradigm shift in how most people think, and the overcoming of centuries worth of ingrained habits of thought.