Spider and the Starfish

  1. In the seventeenth century, why were the Spaniards unable to defeat the Apaches? What implications does this have concerning current, or future organizational competition?

    2. The Spaniards were unable to defeat the Apaches because the Apaches were a decentralized group of people. They had no hierachal leadership, everyone made their own decisions at their own accord. This made is it hard for the Spaniards because they did not know who to target leadership wise. There was no concrete system of the Apaches for the Spaniards to counter. Even when the Spaniards killed Apache Nant'ans(Spiritual Leaders), the Apaches would just appoint another Nant'an becoming more decentralized making it harder for the Spaniards to control.


  2. Briefly compare and contrast centralized and decentralized organizations.

    3. Central Organizations have hierarchical leaderships. Which means there is one Top Boss and has many level of sub-bosses to control their organization. Decentralized organizations have either no boss or many bosses who do their own things when they want. Some similarities include followers. Both systems has to have some sort of 'followers' that maintain the existance and purpose of decentralized or centralized organizations.


  3. List a few of the traits of a decentralized organization.
    • Open System.
    • May have multiple leaders or none at all.
    • Hard to hold accountable
    • Easy to replace leaders
    • No headquarters


  4. From a technical perspective, what is the primary difference between Napster and Kazza?

    5. Napster users uploaded and downloaded files from a particular server or servers whereas Kazza allowed users to download or upload files from multiple users at the same time.


  5. Is this reading relevant to the current competition between new organizations such as Uber and Lyft and existing taxi companies? Why or why not?

    6. I do not believe this reading is relevant to companies such as Uber and Lyft because both applications are doing their businesses legally. They are competing fair and square against the taxi companies by being in the same industry following the same rules and regulations but doing it better, a lot better. Capitalism...Yay!