A Personal Entrepreneur in every home
What if the post personal computer era was actually about personal entrepreneurship?
The PC era distributed the power of computing to each home and offices. Or so was Steve Jobs’ famous claim. The current Apple CEO recently stated that AI will allow creative people to focus on their job. Is it a mere evolution of computing power from PC to AI? Or does it tells us something about a post-PC era?
Back in the ’80s, PC makers adopted different strategies. Some convinced office workers and managers that computing power would increase workforce efficiency. It transformed onto the diffusion of personal computers for each one and not only console terminals for experts. Other makers banked on creative crowds, arguing that people would invent great stuff if they had the computing power at home.
Beyond divergences in approaches, PC makers shared the same vision of a mass market. And so was the PC era dream, a PC on each and every desks.
Since the ’80s, Computing power capacities increased dramatically. And so did the graphic capabilities and other hardware features. With computing power came software, enabling non-coder users to benefit from these hardware specifications to work, create, or play game. With software came along connectivity, content of various kinds, and, more recently, mobility, responsiveness to context or hyper personalisation.
Some argue mobile represents the post-PC movement. But isn’t mobile a mere evolution of the same computing logic?
Recently I started to research on platform economics and theories. The more I work and study these distributed organisation designs and forms of micro-entrepreneurship made accessible for all, the more I see Personal Entrepreneuring as the real post-PC world.
Think about ecosystems like Airbnb, for instance, which distribute the power to enterprise to everyone. The power here is not in terms of operations per millisecond but in terms of venturing capabilities, online as much as offline.
Other platforms facilitating the creation of user-generated content, apps, gigs or project financing expand individuals’ ability to enterprise beyond the moment of cration or invention. Recourses to artificial intelligence co-computation, augmented reality displays or distributed systems of trust and currencies are all digital services with emergent properties beyond hardware and software capacities. These services exist combined with liability insurance schemes, contractual and legal support and other non-digital activities. Platforms are the emerging part of the service ecosystem iceberg.
More than providing additional computing power, these online-offline service ecosystems provide entrepreneuring power. The PC represented an empowering tool for companies and consumers to optimise, gain efficiency, communicate, work and generate added value. Service ecosystems represent an empowering system for companies and consumers to transform into entrepreneuring machines.
In other words, the post-PC era will very likely still be filled with computers of all sorts. However, I bet it will be an era of entrepreneuring rather than simply working, gaming or creating.
The bottom line remains the same capitalist one: empowering people so they may take part in value creation. The means of empowerment differs, however. The business is not built on hardware or software but on service ecosystems.
Turning everyone into an “entrepreneur of themselves” is not without raising questions and will require collective discussions to prevent excesses. But I sense that looking at platforms as entrepreneuring power rather than mere algorithmic management may allow understanding better how the social boundaries are being moved and re-drawn.
