Unleash Your Ideavirus

Busy people don't have time to look at every painting. They only have room in their overcrowded brains for a few paintings. And when you come right down to it, most people would like to see only the "celebrity" paintings. Just as there can be only one "My favorite famous actress" (Julia Roberts) and only one "This site equals the Internet" (Yahoo!), there's room for only one "Most famous painting in the world" -- and the safe choice is the Mona Lisa.

A similar effect is described by Zipf's Law. George Zipf, who was a philologist and a Harvard University professor, discovered that the most popular word in the English language ("the") is used 10 times more than the 10th most popular word, 100 times more than the 100th most popular word, and 1,000 times more than the 1,000th most popular word.

To a greater or lesser degree, this effect applies to market share for automobiles, candy bars, soft drinks, software, and to the frequency of hits on Web pages. In other words, in almost every field of endeavor, being number 1 isn't just a little bit better than being number 2 or number 10 -- it's a whole lot better. Rewards are distributed unevenly, especially in our networked world. On the Internet, the magnification gets even greater, the stakes even higher. The combined market capitalization of Amazon.com, eBay, and priceline.com is far greater than the total market capitalization of every other e-commerce stock combined. So when you win, even by a little, you win a lot.

An ideavirus helps your idea, your business, and your product win -- regardless of how large or small your operation happens to be. Eric Raymond was a little-known programmer when he wrote an essay called "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" in 1997. It was a manifesto, an essay on its way to becoming an ideavirus. In it, Raymond argued the case for the open-source approach to coding -- creating stuff like Linux. But instead of having a magazine or a book publisher bring it to market, he posted the essay online in text, postscript, and audio form. And he gave it away for free.

Within months, tens of thousands of people had read it. Months after that, Raymond published the essay with some of his other free essays in The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (O'Reilly & Associates, 1999) -- which became an "instant" best-seller. Of course, it wasn't instant at all. He had laid the foundation by building an ideavirus.

What has creating an ideavirus done to Raymond's value? Take a look at his financial situation: The virus led him to be in demand as a programmer, as a consultant, and even as a public speaker. And the spread of the open-source movement? In an online column, Raymond offered a mea culpa about what it felt like to become insanely rich when VA Linux Systems Inc. (on whose board of directors he has served since 1998) went public in December 1999.

The Idea Is Father to the Factory

Here are some astonishing facts you should think about long and hard on your way to work tomorrow: Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (such as steel or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of the companies on the list do that. The rest of them make unseemly profits by trafficking in ideas.

Last year, about 30,000 new musical CDs were released in the United States, including one from the Pope. (His Abb? Pater, which I like a lot, features a mix of tunes, including a little rap, a little techno, and a lot of world beats.)

Yahoo!'s market capitalization is 99% due to brand, sizzle, user loyalty, and other "soft" ideas. Only 1% of the company's value comes from selling stuff that customers can't get anywhere else.

Nathan Mhyrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, says that a great employee is worth 1,000 times more than an average one. Why? Because of the quality of her ideas.

Here's the point: Ideas aren't a sideshow that makes our factory a little more valuable. Our factory is a sideshow that makes our ideas a little more valuable.

Word of Mouse Beats Word of Mouth

Think back. Really far. All the way to 1990.

How many people did you have regular telephone contact with? Maybe 10, 20, or 30 in your personal life, and maybe 100 at work?

Now, take a look at your email inbox and your instant-messaging buddy list. How many people do you hear from every week?

Today, we have dramatically more friends and more friends of friends, and we can connect with them faster and more frequently than ever before. And now we've got second- or third- or fourth-order connections. There's an email in my box from someone who is married to someone I went to summer camp with 20 years ago who got my email address from a friend of a friend.