The stronger the information, the stronger its activity. Information is a social acid. It changes the nature of relationships. Information is an economic acid. It changes the nature of costs.
Information also is a perceptual acid.
It changes customers' expectations of service and performance. Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, the acid of information is eating away at your industry structure, your economics, your customer relationships, your organization, and your supply chain. If that information is left unmanaged, established players will see their margin taken away by new entrants who use the standardization and ubiquity of the Internet to aggregate demand chains swiftly. Investors are throwing capital at these new entrants so fast that it is possible to go quickly from small to huge and use the cheap currency of Internet stock to achieve global scale and buy innovations and market share. And they'll go public later this year with a market capitalization of billions of dollars, each swamping the value of their physical competitors.