Means of production and BYOD

In agrarian societies, the means of production is the farm: land of some size, crops, livestock, tools, seeds, workers, and capital.

In industrial societies, the means of production is the factory: land of some size, a building, tools, raw materials, power sources, access to transportation, and capital.

In the industrial age, capitalists owned the means of production. These things, the means of production, cost money. To be successful, capitalists had to be wealthy.

But the capitalists of yore missed something: You don't need to own all of the means of production. You need only a few key parts.

This should be obvious. No company is completely stand-alone. Companies outsource many activities, from payroll to the generation of electricity.


Apple has learned this lesson. Apple designs the products and hires other companies to build them.

The "Bring Your Own Device" idea (BYOD) is an extension of outsourcing. It pushes the ownership of some equipment onto workers. Instead of a company purchasing the PC, operating system, word processor, and spreadsheet for an employee, the employee acquires their own.

Shifting to BYOD means giving some measure of control (and responsibility) to employees. Workers can select their own device, their own operating system, and their own applications. Some businesses want to maintain control over these choices, and they miss the point of BYOD. They want to dictate the specific software that employees must use.

But, as a business owner who is outsourcing tasks to employees, do you care about the operating system they use? Do you care about the specific type of PC? Or the application (as long as you can read the file)?

BYOD is possible because the composition of documents and spreadsheets (and e-mails, and calendars) is not a key aspect of business. It's the ideas within those documents and spreadsheets that make the business run. It's the information that is the vital means of production.

For decades we have focussed on the hardware of computing: processor speed, memory capacity, storage size. I suppose that it started with tabulating machines, and the ability of one machine to process cards faster than another vendor's machine. It continued with mainframes, with minicomputers, and with PCs.

BYOD shows us that hardware is not a strategic advantage. Nor is commodity software -- anyone can have word processors and spreadsheets. Any company can have a web site.

The advantage is in data, in algorithms, and in ideas.