front matter

 

foreword

The analytics operating system

In the twentieth century, scale effects in business were largely driven by breadth and distribution. A company with manufacturing operations around the world had an inherent cost and distribution advantage, leading to more-competitive products. A retailer with a global base of stores had a distribution advantage that could not be matched by a smaller company. These scale effects drove competitive advantage for decades.

The internet changed all of that. Today, three predominant scale effects exist:

  • Network—Lock-in that is driven by a loyal network (Facebook, Twitter, Etsy, and so forth)
  • Economies of scale—Lower unit cost, driven by volume (Apple, TSMC, and so forth)
  • Data—Superior machine learning and insight, driven from a dynamic corpus of data

In Big Data Revolution (Wiley, 2015), I profiled a few companies that are capitalizing on data as a scale effect. But, here in 2019, big data is still largely an unexploited asset in institutions around the world. Spark, the analytics operating system, is a catalyst to change that.

preface

acknowledgments

about this book

Who should read this book

What will you learn in this book?

How this book is organized

About the code

liveBook discussion forum

about the author

about the cover illustration