[sharky93]

I feel 'data' or rather big data is the new oil. There are big monopolies which control a lot of it and are trying to make sense out of it, the likes of Amazon, Google, Palantir et. al. and similarly there are companies like ExxonMobil in the energy sphere. We could in fact extend this analogy to smaller players in the renewable energy zone which are trying to make better qualitative use of their resources and similarly you will find small startups trying to make qualitative sense out of whatever lesser data they have but with niche applications.

[rm_-rf_slash]

The difference between data and oil is that you aren't going to drive to the oilfields one morning and find that it's all been hacked and stolen. Data is collected. Oil is sold.

[saryant]

> The difference between data and oil is that you aren't going to drive to the oilfields one morning and find that it's all been hacked and stolen.

Ask Western oil workers in Libya or Nigeria or Venezuela or Mexico (depending on the decade) how accurate they feel that sentence is. Oil concessions have been regularly expropriated.

[rm_-rf_slash]

Fine then, stolen at the click of a button. Oil is a finite resource, software isn't. We create our own scarcity. Oil = software is a lazy metaphor.

[saryant]

As opposed to the stroke of a pen?

[sharky93]

I guess saying 'oil' is being a bit too specific. It is more like the 'energy' that drives the modern economy? and that is sold and you find new avenues everyday of collecting(producing) it. But yeah, it digresses a bit too much from this post I guess.

[Terr_]

Unless the real resource companies are grabbing for involves "EXCLUSIVE data", which allows them to extract/demand value as the gatekeepers.

[grflynn]

Yeah but we then assume the data is there and exists with all the context intact too. Big Data is a one way mirror into what's happening, but this just results in watching but not being able to take part. It's a one-way operation like calculating a prime