The subtitle of this book is ‘how mass collaboration changes everything’ and Tapscott and Williams do a good job explaining why this is true. Impressive examples from commerce, the arts, and academia are provided in almost every chapter to illustrate the productivity-enhancing power of the internet. Some of these examples are familiar but many are not. The authors clearly have a solid understanding of how internet technology – and the collaboration that this technology affords – has been empowering the growth of many businesses over recent years. 

However I find myself agreeing with many other reviewers of this book that 300 pages could have easily been condensed into 60 pages. While the examples that are provided are certainly impressive and well-researched, they all effectively say the same thing. Every chapter is a variation on the same theme and despite catchy slogans (‘Ideagoras’, ‘the Prosumers’, ‘the New Alexandrians’?) does not really require a full chapter’s development. Partly as a result of this repetition the book can at times be a tough read.

As a macroeconomist I would have also hoped that the book might bring to the fore the macroeconomic issues concerning the competition-enhancing thrust of internet technology and its productivity-empowering potential. The book is clearly not intended for a macroeconomist but some non-technical discussion of these issues and their implications would have been useful.

As someone moreover who wrote extensively about the productivity-related issues concerning internet technology prior to (and during) the bursting of the dot-com bubble I was also somewhat perturbed by the gushing tone and cheer-leading commentary that characterises much of the book. Is Wikipedia really as accurate as the Encylopedia Britannica, as the authors claim? A more critical appraisal of the internet can be found in John Robb’s ‘Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization’. Here, what Tapscott and Williams call ‘Wikinomics’, Robb calls ‘4th generation warfare’! 

The book, however, is at times an interesting read. It made me think more about the powerful macroeconomic effects that the internet has unleashed in the world economy over recent years. More importantly it made me think more about the potential it clearly still has to render further macroeconomic and microeconomic changes over the years ahead.