The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff

1The Fourth Revolution

“In the technology industry people always over-estimate what you can do in one year and under-estimate what you can do in one decade.”

—Marc Benioff, Founder and CEO,salesforce.com

Approximately once a decade, a radical new technology emerges that fundamentally changes the business landscape. In every case, regardless of prior competitive dynamics, businesses that understand and appropriately adopt the technology win, while those that fail to do so lose. In the 1970s, this was mainframe computing. In the 1980s, it was the PC. In the 1990s, it was the Internet. And today, it is the online social graph (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Every decade since the advent of computing, a new wave of technology sweeps across the business ...