Fortune Small Business has a story about Microsoft hiring anthropologists to study small businesses. Why? It seems that they finally noticed that this where the growth is in our economy. Fortune 500 companies are relatively flat in their growth, while entrepreneurs continue to add jobs and spend on the capital needs of their firms, including hardware and software.
“Their fieldwork is far removed from the popular perception of the anthropologist as lantern-jawed adventurer in baggy shorts and pith helmet, canoeing up the Amazon in search of the proverbial lost tribe. But there is a certain correspondence between Microsoft’s research agenda and the work of those old-time anthropologists, many of whom were funded by colonial governments that needed to understand their native subjects in order to rule them more effectively. The modern version of this knowledge-power dynamic is Microsoft, a multinational technology colossus that hires anthropologists who study the natives in order to sell them more software.”
Be careful Bill Gates–I hear the natives are restless!
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