The internet loves parallel projects.

Linux development is parallel. Thousands of people can work on it at once, none of them waiting in line.

Wikipedia is parallel, because a large group can go at millions of articles, side by side. The YouTube Orchestra auditions were parallel too, because you didn’t have to wait in line to practice or apply.

Parallel is faster and more efficient. The Huffington Post will always outperform a traditional news site because they have 3,000 contributors, not a few dozen.

If you want to make a buffet go faster, all you need to do is move the serving table away from the wall and let people serve themselves from either side. If you want to go faster still, use two tables.

Self-service customer support outperforms the traditional model because people don’t have to wait in line.

Your organization probably isn’t parallel. There are bottlenecks throughout, and finding them and making them parallel could change everything.

There’s one place you don’t want to be parallel, at least at first: sales.

When you are linear in your sales process, you learn something. You don’t make the same mistake on each and every call. Instead, you make a few mistakes on your first call, then a few less and then, finally, you get it as right as you’re going to get it. That is when you go parallel, not before.

Source: Seth Godin – Linear and parallel

Found this great article at HotHouse – Interactive agencies need to stop being advertising agencies - although i dont think the name of this article gives the vision it offers justice.

…For the internet industry… the last 15 years have been extraordinary. The world has changed. Minnows attacked huge existing businesses and won. In some cases those traditional businesses are still around. But in many cases they are not. There are many examples:

-Why did Brittanica not become Wikipedia? They had a start, they had the content.
-Why did LexisNexis not become Google? They had a start, they had the content.
-Why did Trading Post not become eBay?
-Why did Dymocks not become Amazon?

Too lazy, too stupid, not ready to take a risk?

And the examples go on. Small businesses have in a short time overtaken and beaten traditional business by changing the game. To be part of all that has been a privilege.

This a great article… Interactive agencies need to stop being advertising agencies – Have a read