The basis of commercial enterprise is information. That hasn’t changed in thousands of years.
However, those who feel that today’s big data is just a continuation of past information trends are as wrong as if they were to claim that a stone tablet is essentially the same as a tablet computer or an abacus similar to a supercomputer.
Today, we have more information than ever. But the importance of all that information extends beyond simply being able to do more, or know more, than we already do. The quantitative shift leads to a qualitative shift. Having more data allows us to do new things that weren’t possible before. In other words: More is not just more. More is new. More is better. More is different.
Of course, there are still limits on what we can obtain from or do with data. But most of our assumptions about the cost of collecting and the difficulty of processing data need to be overhauled. No area of human endeavor or industrial sector will be immune from the incredible shakeup that’s about to occur as big data plows through society, politics, and business. People shape their tools—and their tools shape them.