Sunday, December 16, 2012

Manufacturing vs. Social Media

Manufacturing and the social media are two of the greatest innovations in our human history.

In general, manufacturing and the social media are very different.  Manufacturing truly took off with the Industrial Revolution, while the social media is a recent phenomenon catalyzed by the advent of the Internet.  Manufacturing is hardware; social media is software.  Manufacturing is capital intensive, social media is not.

However, one interesting common feature about manufacturing and the social media is that they both heavily depend on scale, but for different reasons.  Manufacturing needs scale to reduce its overhead costs, while the social media needs scale to make its main function -- social -- work.  For manufacturing, without scale, individual manufactured goods would still work, but would be too expensive to make manufacturing sustainable.  For the social media, without scale, the services it provides would simply not work at all, since they all require social interactions.


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