I recently found the following article. This is extremely relevant in the world of ozone. As ozone companies we tend to hide, or keep our data and information from each-other. Many times our friendly competition double up our research, and sometimes our mistakes. We need to remember a few things.
#1 rising tides floats all boats. If the ozone industry grows, each ozone company within that industry has the potential to also grow. There is tremendous growth opportunity in the world of water treatment for ozone.
#2 the real competition in the world of ozone is actually chlorine and other oxidants marketed by the traditional water treatment companies. Other ozone companies are only a small amount of our actual competition.
Reconsidering business obstacles to shared data
Something is wrong with how businesses share data. It takes an act of Congress, like Sarbanes-Oxley or similar, to get businesses to actually start to share more data … why is that? Of course, there are very good reasons … but the reasons or obstacles still need to be overcome.
Over the long sweep of time, humans have generally been a lot better off after humans started sharing more and more data. We human beings have probably always learned a lot from each other — sharing data was the original “killer app” that put our species on the map. For a long time, we have learned more from others than we learn from our own experience … language, the written word and printed books help a lot …but information and communication technology has REALLY helped us. We are learning so much now, so much faster … comparing, sorting, sifting, browsing, mulling over shared data … that we are still coming to terms with exactly the rules are for NEW social etiquette and exactly how we should [responsibly] share information. The RULES are still being debated.
But the benefits of drinking from the information firehose are becoming pretty obvious in a private context. Think about how much we depend upon reviews or reputation scores or forum posting to evaluate purchases … commerce is far different than it was 20 years and that change is HUGE compared to the change that happened in the 20 years before that. Consider how the data shared by different people on social networks has accelerated the benefits you enjoy, maybe even faster than you figure out how to enjoy those benefits — think about the way that we stay current [with people that we could not otherwise visit] by looking at posted photos of kids or events or even jokes OR think about blog posts or inside stories from battle fronts or all kinds of information that was effectively unavailable ten or twenty years ago.
Even the bad uses of shared data are probably better than the world before shared data … internet stalking might seem like a bad thing, until one considers that some internet stalking might actually decrease violent paranoid behavior — we might well be considerably better off now in a world where the uber-CREEPY alternative of physical stalking is necessary.
YES THERE ARE ISSUES … but MORE INFORMATION, MORE TRANSPARENCY IS GENERALLY A GOOD THING!
And yet, most business leaders aren’t really buying that … they are not really buying that businesses should be sharing data with other businesses … many are not really buying that data in the cloud is safer than data stored and backed up onsite …very, very, very few are willing to share data with competitors — there are even anti-trust barriers enforced by government to prevent some of this … consider, for example, what would happen if real estate MLSs shared too much data in listing agreements. But as long as we don’t share data, we are missing an opportunity. SOMEDAY SOON, SOMEBODY IS GOING TO FIGURE OUT HOW BUSINESSES CAN SHARE DATA.