The great clash documented in this book is between the atom economy, which is in the business of selling stuff, such as food, clothing, cars, CDs and the byte economy, which is the business of selling knowledge, image, access and convenience through products that have no physical presence.



As a late-stage baby boomer myself, I have had my own difficulties wrapping my brain around ways of thinking that come naturally to the generation that has never known a non-digital world. How to proceed with the kind of cause-and-effect thinking we are used to, and embrace what (to us) might be a brilliant, but non-obvious solution for monetizing something? for building a business? We oldsters see value in things made of atoms, and things made of atoms are inextricably linked to a certain overhead that we explain as "the cost of doing business." There is a certain division of labor (management, sales, administrative) that oversees the selling of atoms, and there (seemingly) are only so many acceptable models for selling them.



So it is pleasant to a materialistic rationalist such as myself to get this perspective from Anderson: "Economics has little place for morality for the same reason that evolution is unsentimental about extinction -- it describes what happens, not what SHOULD happen." In other words, there is no right or wrong way to model a business, in moral terms, just different ways to model them. The Protestant habit of equating business success with divine blessing or validation is just a sloppy habit of anthropomorphizing, and unfortunately, we can't even hope it's on Evolution's To Do list to relieve humanity of this habit, because then we fall in to the trap of ascribing value to Evolution's work and method.



Anderson adds tremendous value to this book by providing well-thought out example business models at the end.