It's not the rate of change, but, the changing rate of change that is the problem

John Farrell also made another point:

I think Peter should make a caveat up front, and that is regarding the rigid conservatism behind the movie-making enterprise. While the collaboration involved in the making of film is clear, it's also clear to most people that film makers do not consider what Peter calls "the suitability of the subject matter...perceived changing trends in audience interests." This is the last thing on most movie producer's minds. Given the money needed to produce a film, producers and investors are petrified of losses and confine themselves (and sadly the audiences) again and again to re-creating only what they know was a hit before.

John Farrell

This illustrates the problem of using metaphors. The way in which people collaborate in the movie business has many useful parallels in the world of e-business, but, these apply only up to a point. In movie making, there is constant change in fashion and technology, but, this change (as it was in the twentieth century anyway) is reasonably steady and the extent of any change can be predicted with sufficient accuracy to make a reasonable assessment of down side risks.

In e-business, there is no way of assessing the risk because the production cannot take the form of a set plan were there can be a fixed budget and a specified time for completion. Certainly attempts can be planned and given a time scale, but, such attempts cannot be guaranteed to produce a satisfactory result or at least a result that is appropriate for any length of time.

Realistically, e-business solutions have to be designed as open ended projects with no fixed costs or completion dates. Solutions have to be developed on the basis of many short steps with reappraisals and redirectioning at every step. This is likely to involve more than just a few changes in direction: occasionally it may necessitate the scrapping of everything that has gone before to make a completely new start with new ideas and even new people.

In this sense, the similarities between movie making and e-business creation break down. In e-business, there is no equivalent of the planned shooting stage. There is no planned production as such. The whole process of creating e-business solutions is more like one continuous pre production phase. Thus the usefulness of the film making industry metaphor stops short of the actual production.

Differing also from the metaphor of the movie is the need for e-business strategies to administer several alternative solutions at the same time. This would be like a film director starting out by making several different movies together and abandoning those that seemed not to be working out too well. This requires a unique way of thinking that only makes sense in the context of Game Theory.