Roughly five years after internet users caught on, the bookshops are suddenly full of books about the user-generated content that “Web 2.0” makes possible: the blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook and the rest. Well, you can forget them, because easily the world's most profitable enabler of user-generated content opened the doors of its first superstore 50 years ago, in Almhult, Sweden.

    It is now hard to imagine life without Ikea. A folk statistic would have you believe that one in 10 Europeans is conceived in an Ikea bed. But isn't it pushing it a little to compare Ikea to Facebook?

    I'll admit that the similarities are not apparent at first sight. But a defining idea behind Wikipedia, Facebook and blogging platforms such as Wordpress is that if you give people the right tools, they'll use them to create wonderful things in collaboration with each other or with the organisation that provides the catalyst.

    Ikea's success is not so very different. Ikea keeps its costs and prices low by enlisting its customers – their time, their cars, their ambitions as interior designers, and their inflated ideas of their carpentry skills.

    The management experts Rafael Ramirez and Richard Normann pointed this out in the Harvard Business Review back in 1993. Ikea, they argued, was a success because it enabled “value co-production”. This infelicitous term partly refers to offering consumers a discount to build their own furniture. But it means much more: Ikea recruited its customers to the idea that they could not only put up shelves but they could design their own stylish living spaces, equipping them with tape measures and printing almost 200 million catalogues that also serve as design manuals. It also devoted huge energies to helping its suppliers and designers play their part, rather than passively buying what these people offered and then re-selling it.

    We all know that the formula works. But most successful formulas are easy to copy; this one is not, and that is the genius of it. In many ways Ikea seems to be offering yesterday's business model: surely we have less time than we did 20 years ago, while having more money to spend on our homes. When a typical London home costs £300,000, why are cheap sofas to put in it still such a tempting offering?

    Yet Ikea continues to thrive, proving how hard it is for competitors to muscle in on a business that has placed itself at the centre of a web of economic actors, all striving for the same goal: a funky sitting room for Steve and Alice from Croydon.

    Not many technology companies have succeeded in mobilising an army of “value co-producers” in the same way. Microsoft is the most important exception, creating a platform that supports – and is supported by – the efforts of countless other software companies. Games console manufacturers live or die with the companies that produce the games. And eBay is an old-school dotcom company that has created a near-unassailable position: the buyers go there because the sellers go there, and vice versa.

    Such a market position brings inevitable temptation to exploit it. Microsoft's tangles with the competition authorities are notorious. Facebook's new advertising system, “Beacon”, tells your friends about commercial sites you've visited; the project triggered a mini-rebellion among Facebook users. Ikea is an old hand at herding customers through a labyrinthine store layout. Customers don't like it but lacking a good enough alternative, we tolerate it.

    Or we tolerate it up to a point. My love affair with Facebook was brief and bland. And Ikea? Let's just say that my children were not conceived in an Ikea bed, and leave it at that.

    Tim Harford's new book, ‘The Logic of Life', is published on January 15 in the US and on February 1 in the UK 

    在網民著迷了大約5年之后，書店里突然之間充滿了各種有關用戶自創內容的書籍。讓這一切變成可能的，是所謂的“Web 2.0”：博客、維基百科(Wikipedia)、Facebook，不一而足。不過，你大可忘了它們，因為世界上最賺錢的用戶自創內容“提供者”，早在50年前就在瑞典阿姆胡特開張了第一間超市。

    現在很難想象，如果沒有宜家(Ikea)，生活會是什么樣。民間統計數據會讓你相信，每10個歐洲人，就有一個是在宜家的床上孕育出來的。看到這里，難道你不會從宜家聯想到Facebook？

    我承認，乍看起來，兩者的共同點并不明顯。不過，維基百科、Facebook和Wordpress等博客平臺背后的定義性理念就是，如果你向人們提供了正確的工具，他們就會利用這些工具，通過彼此合作，或者與提供這種催化劑的組織合作，創造出非常出色的東西。

    宜家的成功也沒有太大差別。宜家能夠將自己的成本和價格保持在較低水平，方法就是“征募”它的顧客——他們的時間、他們的汽車、他們成為室內設計師的雄心，以及他們對自己木工手藝的膨脹信心。

    早在1993年，管理學專家拉斐爾•拉米雷斯(Rafael Ramirez)和理查德•諾曼(Richard Normann)就在《哈佛商業評論》(Harvard Business Review)上指出了這一點。他們提出，宜家的成功，是因為它讓“價值共創”(value co-production)成為可能。這個不太恰當的詞匯，部分意思是指向顧客提供折扣，由他們自己組裝家具。不過，它還有更多含義。宜家爭取到顧客對其觀點的認同：他們不僅能自己組裝置物架，通過向他們提供卷尺、印刷近2億個同時可以作為設計手冊的商品目錄，顧客還能自己設計時髦的居住空間。宜家還投入巨大精力，幫助供應商和設計師發揮自己的作用，而不是被動購買他們提供的東西，然后轉手賣給顧客。

    我們都知道，這個模式很有效。多數成功的模式都易于抄襲，但這個模式屬于例外，而這就是其中的高明之處。從很多方面來看，宜家提供的似乎都是一個過時的商業模式：相比于20年前，我們的時間更緊張了，但有更多的錢可以花在房子上。當一套普通的倫敦住宅就需要30萬英鎊的時候，一套廉價的沙發憑什么依然具有吸引力？

    然而，宜家依然生意興隆，證明了競爭者要向擠進這塊業務是多么困難。這塊業務已經成為一群經濟行為人的中心，所有人都奮力追尋著同一個目標：為來自克羅伊登的史迪夫(Steve)和愛麗絲(Alice)搭建一間有個性的起居室。

    沒有多少科技企業能夠用同樣的方法成功動員一支“價值共創者”大軍。微軟(Microsoft)是最重要的例外，它創造了一個平臺，支持無數其它軟件公司的努力，同時也得到了它們的支持。游戲機生產商與游戲開發商存亡與共。eBay是一個老派的互聯網公司，建立了幾乎無人可以撼動的地位：買家去eBay是因為賣家在那里，賣家去eBay是因為買家在那里。

    有了這樣的市場地位，不可避免地會帶來利用這一地位的誘惑。微軟與反壟斷當局的斗爭世人皆知。Facebook新的廣告系統“Beacon”會把你訪問過的商業網站告訴你的朋友；這個項目在用戶之中引發了小小的叛亂。宜家很擅長通過迷宮一樣的店鋪設計來引導顧客。顧客不喜歡，但沒有更好的選擇，只能忍著。

    也許，我們的容忍會有限度。我與Facebook的熱戀簡短而乏味。宜家呢？我只想說，我的孩子不是在宜家的床上孕育出來的。到此為止