Note this is the second part of a two-part series. The first part is right here. In my first (very long) post, I reviewed a quick definition of an open ethos and looked at a few industries that had been reinvented. Now moving on to the second part, I’ll start by pointing out a few generalizations and then cover some industries that I believe are especially vulnerable to reinvention.

A few General Traits of an Open Ethos Organization

From reading and thinking about it (remember these are think out-loud posts), the traits all center around how an organization can be open or accessible to their customers. Specifically, here are things that should be obvious about the organization and it’s product …

• Transparent
• Extensible
• Accessible
• Thought Leader

Transparent

A user can understand exactly how the organization’s product or service works, in as much detail as they want. Obviously, for some levels of detail a user will need to have a sufficient level of expertise. For example, in regards to open source software a user may need to have a knowledge of the programming language the application was written in - but they can review the entire source. Another example of transparency, is the ability to audit the changes to a wiki page.

Extensible

The product of an organization can be copied and built upon at any point. Again, the easiest example is open source projects that build on other project such as Nutch being built on top of Lucene. Another good example, is companies opening their APIs to other services for new applications.

Accessible

While most organizations have merit based levels of access, the key concept is that anyone can interact with the organization and provide input. This is done a number of ways including: great customer support, easy access to roadmaps and schedules, and easy methods to provide feedback.

Thought Leader

This may be the least obvious, but it seems like for the other characteristics to work out resulting in order and not anarchy - there must be brand associated with the organization (whether the brand of the leader or the organization itself) that is trusted as a thought leader. In many cases, I think the brand and individual are indistinguishable (Linux and Linus Torvalds or Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales).

Vulnerable Industries

With that backdrop, here are some industries that seem vulnerable to me.

• Online Advertising
• Science
• Mobile Phone Industry
• Music Distribution
• Others ??? (let me know in the comments if there are others that jump to mind) …

Online Advertising

Most of the advertising networks take forty-plus percent of the revenue from advertisers. Historically, this made sense when there were sales and business development activities necessary to build these networks. However, for a lot of the “long-tail” the self-service model has reduced the amount of effort necessary for both recruiting advertisers and publishers. Yet, Google & Yahoo have proven the self-service model works for online advertising.

In addition to networks, I also think the ad serving space is very vulnerable. Interestingly, there has been a lot of conversation online recently about Double Click being acquired by Microsoft or Google. In my opinion, this is a really bad idea! The ad serving market needs to be reinvented by a competitor with an open ethos. If I were either Google or Microsoft, I’d wait for the other company to acquire Double-Click and then release a completely open and free advertising server.

Science

There is a really interesting paper reviewing the concept of the open source being applied to Biotechnology space. This seems very credible, but admittedly I don’t know a lot about the space that well.

Mobile Phone Industry

The mobile phone industry is dominated by just a few carriers who work hard to restrict access to their devices. Yet, customers want the ability to extend their phones in new and creative ways. In many ways, I think the explosion of buzz around Twitter is really just a symptom of users finally beginning to discover services for their mobile phone.

Music Distribution

Didn’t you see TechMeme … Apple & EMI have solved world hunger! In all seriousness, the music industry seems like it will certainly be reinvented in the next year.

Your Turn

What other industries are vulnerable to being reinvented?