The question, we think, is how to maintain high margins in an environment that is continually turning high margin business into commodities at an extraordinary pace. Reaching far beyond the realm of Electronic Recruiting, this question is central to the long term success of any company in or out of our business. Like we see everyday in Electronic Recruiting, the moment a good new idea hits the market, the competitors begin to copy it. We think this question is at the center of the development of a workable strategy in our industry and the rest of the Internet industry. One approach to solving the problem is to institutionalize a wisdom department.
Wisdom represents the highest value, data the lowest.
We believe that all wisdom has a half-life. At the half-life point, wisdom degrades into information and can be automated. A Wisdom department would be in charge of developing a constant stream of new wisdom and figuring out how to deliver it to the customer. This approach, appropriate for a large institutional player, assumes that commodity pricing is a good thing and that low margins are the key to market dominance. In this model, survival is sold rather than the opportunity for a customer to gain real market benefit.