mikolas

The tipping point, entropy, Swarzchild radius and quantum fluctuations

March 5, 2008 – 21:38 by Mikko Hämäläinen

It’s been a while since I last wrote anything as this blog was not meant as an active outlet for my excess toughts. However, I may have to change my ways as my amount of input vs. amount of output ratio is rapidly approaching infinity.

As a more educated reader might have guessed, I’ve been studying physics quite a bit lately. What actually started just as a way to pass time and clear up my head, has had enormous effect on my thinking both in general and especially in my work.

So, what the heck has all this to do with my daily work. On the surface, nothing of course. As my general interest is more on the business side and how to use technology to better support business growth, it makes little sense to know all the theoretical physics stuff I’ve been studying lately. However on a deeper level, theoretical physics has all to do with business as many of the principles in the quantum world – or astrophysical phenomena for that matter – present similar patterns that you can perceive in the chaotic business world we’re living in this very day.

A lot is happening in media and entertainment industry at the moment, as whole business value chains are changing due to recent technological developments. The Google factor is one classic example of the disruptive effects of technology, but that is not all that is happening. The classified business as we’ve known it is already on its way to full digitalization, the music industry is going digital, the movie and TV industry have first signs of starting value chain disruption and even the book publishing business is showing first symptoms of going digital.

This all means that the traditional business is going to have hard time to stay on the wave of digitalization and, what is more interesting, digitalization opens up new opportunities for startups that do not have the 100+ years of carriage with them and more importantly, no traditional assets to protect. The business opportunities might be small at first, at least when compared with the traditional business, but as we’ve seen in the real physical world: microscopic changes might, and usually will, cause tremendous changes on macroscopic level given the right environment to nurture in.

This pretty much compares with natural evolution cycles both in biological and physical sense. In biological world, those who adapt will survive but disruptions like natural disasters can change the rules rapidly. On the other hand, the physical world is driven by the battle of entropy versus gravity, quantum level fluctuations that slowly but surely tend to disrupt the equilibrium of otherwise static systems.

So, understanding business has everything to do with understanding physical phenomena. It gives you the tools and structure to understand what happens and why and, more importantly, how to implicitly cause the fluctuations that end up changing the rules of business.