Hard-headed profit seekers sometimes learn from airy-sounding philosophers.
The key to any peer-to-peer e-business strategy is the understanding that when a project can be divided into a lot of small pieces, and any one piece can be performed by any of a large number of possible producers (peers), there does not need to be a large motivation -- either in profit or salary or in the satisfaction of hierarchical commands -- to get the work done. There need only be enough motivation to get each of the small pieces done. That motivation can even be the satisfaction of doing the job.
History
The phrase "peer-to-peer" (P2P) first arose in the context of computer networking. It was common by the start of the 21st century to refer to an architecture of task-sharing nodes without any central server or host. A related use of P2P refers to file sharing. A column by Leslie Walker in "The Washington Post" in November 2002 cited Napster, "the music-sharing network that record companies sued for copyright infringement," as a paradigm of P2P in this sense.
The sense more directly relevant to business strategies developed as an analogy to this.
P2P as a Social Philosophy
Since then, some theorists have come to use P2P as a term for their social and political views. In 2005, Michel Bauwens, former strategic director for a telecommunications company, Belgacom, wrote an essay on "The Political Economy of Peer Production," which put forward such views with enthusiasm. P2P for Bauwens is a "third way" that is neither socialistic nor capitalistic, that involves the creation of value "through the free cooperation of producers" with the profit motive or central planning.
Though that may sound like airy philosophizing, P2P is this sense is pertinent to business strategies. As Bauwens also observed, open-source software -- which he sees as a P2P idea -- has been "enthusiastically supported by venture capital and large [information technology] companies such as IBM."
PageRank
Google engaged in a form of P2P e-business strategy when it created its PageRank system. As Yochai Benkler explained in an article in the "Yale Law Journal" (2002), PageRank is software that ranks Web pages on the presumption that anyone who has linked to a particular page has given that page a vote of confidence. Further, pages that "themselves are heavily linked-to count as more important votes" than the obscure ones. In this way, Google has "harnassed the distributed judgments of many users," without paying for those judgments or ordering them. Indeed, each vote is cast by an independent content creator as a byproduct of making his own site more helpful for its users.
Finance
P2P ideas found use in the world of finance, even before the crisis of September-October 2008 produced such discontent with older models. Amy Hoak wrote of the use of social networking by people who wanted to retire their credit card debt, in a MarketWatch article, in January 2008.
