Various kinds of cooperators

Soon after the discussions with this developer, I visited the annual Internet World trade show being held at Olympia in London. I was wandering around, looking at the various companies exhibiting their products and services, when my eye caught a stand that was offering the services of expert programmers from India. I spoke to the Indian director of this company who was in London for a short visit and asked him how they operated.

He told me that they worked exclusively through a company in the UK, who got contracts for them. Apparently, there were a team of fifty programmers and graphic designers in India who were working for a tenth of the salaries that were being paid to their counterparts in the UK. He was at great pains to stress that all of the employees were highly skilled and took great trouble to make sure the work they carried out was exactly to specification and tested exhaustively.

I asked if they could work flexibly with a very loose specification that was incomplete and could be constantly changed and updated. He look at me as if I was mad. "No", he explained patiently, "We have to have an exact and detailed specification otherwise we can't handle it".

Immediately, the flaw in what would seem to be an ideal solution for cost reduction was exposed. These expert worker may be working cheaply, but, they were confined to working within a predetermined structural plan. Any form of genetic algorithm approach, to create an evolving solution would be impractical.

Comparing in my mind the flexible strategy employed by the developer I'd been speaking to and the services being offered by the firm of low cost employees in India, I wondered if there was a way in which these could be combined and brought within the frame work of a genetic algorithm approach where solutions evolved. It seemed to be a suitable problem for Game Theory to solve.

As I visited the various stands at the Internet World show, I was amazed at the multitude and diversity of the approaches and solutions to e-business and the exploitation of the e-business environment. Every stand I visited had some novel twist, a different kind of solution, a fulfilment of a speciality niche. Some were offering exciting, but, unproven products and services, others were offering solutions that had already passed their sell-by date. I wondered how many of them would still be in business by the time the show came around again in the following year.

The thought struck me that this was very similar to a rapidly evolving ecosystem. But, ecosystem evolution is driven by chance and probabilities. Did the survival of all these companies depend upon probability? It seemed as if it might be, because many of the solutions being offered were mutually exclusive. Some of them had to fail, yet, all thought they could succeed. As nobody could be in a position to know which would be the eventual winners, it did seem as if chance and probability would be major factors in determining who would still be in existence in the following year.

Then I looked at it from a lower level of organisation. The companies and the solutions might be subject to intense evolutionary pressures, but, most of the people, the ideas, the components of the companies were likely to survive to be there again in the following year. Maybe in different forms, in different mixes and combinations, but, they wouldn't be so easily evolved out of the ecosystem. They were the genes from the gene pool and the memes from the meme pool. Their evolutionary survival, to the next generation of technological progress in the following year, would be quite separate from those of the organisational structures they were associated with.

Thinking in this way it became obvious that the most important strategies would be the strategies of the individuals who made up these companies. In the same way that the actors and actresses, writers, technicians and crew members were not out of the game if a film doesn't succeed, most of the people at this trade show would survive even if they were working with new companies or on different solutions.

I thought of the entrepreneurs; the auteur solution providers; the experts and the specialists; the niche service providers; the executives of the core bricks and mortar businesses that were looking for solutions. Fundamentally, these were all individuals and they were each using individual personal strategies that they were relying on to get them through to the next stages of this rapidly evolving world.