>
> Just a week or so ago the Los Angeles Times ran an article about
> companies who bought into the idea of supply-chain software and ended up
> eating it. They were going to streamline their operations. The only
> problem was, the stuff didn't come in shrink-wrapped packages like the
> stuff from Egghead and install as easily as a CD copy of some computer
> game on one's personal computer. They forgot that the data in their
> particular industries required that the software be extensively
> "configured" and programmed (and the programming being unique, and
> highly layered, it tends to be bug-prone in ways that software used by
> hundreds of thousands of consumers isn't).
>
> Supposedly half of the companies underestimated cost and deployment time
> by at least half. Some bought the software and virtually sat on it,
> bcause they couldn't get other deparments to buy into the changes it
> required; others couldn't get it customized correctly because they
> skimped on the necessary programming staff.
Ok, so there is much more to reconfigure than simply your software installation. But isn't that the message that business books have been playing for years? The commoditization of everything is, from the capitalist point of view, breaking everything into easy to re-organise blocks. So, for instance, my friend, who teaches English to foreign lerners, is paid essentially per hour. The learners pay per hour, and the course material is bought off the shelf. The company in question is thus less a school, with all the infrastructure that that demands, and more a simplified conduit for the abstract operation of extracting surplus value in the course of production. The management theory is that the result of outsourcing, etc. is that the combination of a pile of cash and a MBA can be used to produce well nigh anything overnight.
Of course, cases like the privatised British Rail system show that in practice the interfaces are nowhere near seamless, and introduce shit loads of overhead into the system, since no one knows or trusts any of the business units they interface with. Computerisation in theory changes some of that, yet the MBA answer that any 'inflexibility' in the system is the fault of recalcitrant luddittes seems a bit stretched to me.
This is stuff I spend a lot of time thinking about - and I think the debates on the importance, or not, of 'immaterial labour', arise from here - if the process of bringing capacity online is very cheap, then differentiation cannot be in terms of who produces a particular product (since the barriers to entry for a market drop drastically), but rather in some other space. This all fuels a change of focus - on the one hand intense orientation towards finding / creating niche markets (using tools like market surveys, branding, etc.), and on the other hand a zealous defence of intellectual property. This is pretty much the ethos of the 'New Economy', and while a whole lot of that is so much fluff, the growing wars over IP, etc. suggest that this isn't all total bullshit.
So, what changes? One question which I'm stuck on is, what does capital mean in an economy like this? Is the Nike brand capital? What makes something 'intellectual capital' rather than simply intellectual property?
Any takers?
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 k*256^2+2083 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B