Dare Obasanjo shoots holes in David Hornik's (and Chris Anderson's) theory of abundance. From Hornik's site:

The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance -- don't do one thing, do it all; don't sell one piece of content, sell it all; don't store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn't work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.

Dare does a great job of driving trucks through the holes in that argument:

All this talk of Abundance being the new Economy misses the point that Scarcity is still what drives all economic endeavors. What has happened with the advent of the Web is that certain things that were traditionally considered scarce are now abundant (e.g. shelf space, editorial content, software, etc) which means that the new economic lords are those that can exploit scarcity along another axis.

Read the rest of his post; it uses the iPod/iTunes store as a good example. There's another thing Hornik misses though, and that's quality of service. If any business attempts to "do it all", the end result will be a complete lack of focus. Laura Ries does a great job of explaining the flaws in that theory on a regular basis; I'd recommend nearly any post she's ever made for guidance there.

The short answer is this: those who try to be all things to all people typically end up being nothing useful for anyone.

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