Chris Anderson at Wired has recently written a fine piece on abundance, scarcity and what's going on with all that there... I generally like the taxonomy at the end; I think that's very helpful.
But, I want to jump in with a bit of a different perspective on the expository section.
For some situations, there's such a thing as "scarcity," and in other situations, it's not relevant at all, which is a bit hard to fathom. It's like the difference between classical mechanics (where energy can have any value) and quantum mechanics (where energy can only have specific values). It freaks people out specifically because it's such a big difference from how we perceive reality.
However, I look at things in terms of how they advance several types of capital, and how they have *some* degree of transferability among them: financial, social, intellectual and environment (personal and environmental health). We used to think about everything in terms of financial capital or precise monetization of other types of capital.
But each type of capital has both a "revenue" or wealth-accumulating component (popularity, knowledge, fitness, brand-identity...) but also an ability to mitigate risk in its own or a different category.
An example: IP
Freely distributing IP is not only a good way to capture as many users as possible so that future monetization (e.g. ad revenues) can be as large as possible, but an excellent risk management technique. If the greatest risk to future revenues is obscurity, then eliminating a barrier to adoption increases omnipresence.
The other is that since you're in what they call an "abundant" situation (one not constrained by scarcity because there's no marginal cost), then there is no actual limit to the market penetration of the IP in terms of financial cost.
That said, there's still a limit to adoption based on knowledge,
brand, health.... but those are design constraints. So there is
abundance in the financial domain, but scarcity in other domains.
Interestingly, we
don't think of "scarcity of good design" because obviously there's
nothing that theoretically limits the presence of excellent design.
This is why I think in terms of risk: good design isn't a limited
resource that we're fighting over, but it's certainly not a "given" -
there are a lot of issues with adoption based on poor design, even in
situations where everyone knows the importance of design excellence.
Why? Because design necessarily assumes a lot about what's going to
happen in the future. Research can happen, great minds with a lot of
experience can sit around and think up best approaches. But it's not
certain. Some other development might derail the plan.
So there is another regime: one where we don't talk about scarcity or abundance, but where we talk about how knowable the design parameters are, and whether we're mitigating risk or uncertainty.
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