Your partners, as well as your competitors, may be at the end of a global supply chain, on another continent. You may never actually speak to your customers. Even the distinction between big business and small business has begun to crumble, as a virtual corporation with a few dozen employees can have tens of millions of dollars of annual sales and command influence beyond the wildest dreams of the erstwhile captains of industry. This is not a book about the future, real or imagined. Our own time may not be, on the surface, as tumultuous as Orwell's, but we are living in an age of revolution social and economic as much as it is technological.
Fuzzy logic is both metaphor and methodology.
We must contend with the infinite vague categories of possibility, the immeasurable potential paths leading from any point in time. Indeed, contingency, subversion and uncertainty have emerged as the only givens of the information revolution. We have come to expect that the only thing that doesn't change is change itself.