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 

    在网民着迷了大约5年之后，书店里突然之间充满了各种有关用户自创内容的书籍。让这一切变成可能的，是所谓的“Web 2.0”：博客、维基百科(Wikipedia)、Facebook，不一而足。不过，你大可忘了它们，因为世界上最赚钱的用户自创内容“提供者”，早在50年前就在瑞典阿姆胡特开张了第一间超市。

    现在很难想象，如果没有宜家(Ikea)，生活会是什么样。民间统计数据会让你相信，每10个欧洲人，就有一个是在宜家的床上孕育出来的。看到这里，难道你不会从宜家联想到Facebook？

    我承认，乍看起来，两者的共同点并不明显。不过，维基百科、Facebook和Wordpress等博客平台背后的定义性理念就是，如果你向人们提供了正确的工具，他们就会利用这些工具，通过彼此合作，或者与提供这种催化剂的组织合作，创造出非常出色的东西。

    宜家的成功也没有太大差别。宜家能够将自己的成本和价格保持在较低水平，方法就是“征募”它的顾客——他们的时间、他们的汽车、他们成为室内设计师的雄心，以及他们对自己木工手艺的膨胀信心。

    早在1993年，管理学专家拉斐尔•拉米雷斯(Rafael Ramirez)和理查德•诺曼(Richard Normann)就在《哈佛商业评论》(Harvard Business Review)上指出了这一点。他们提出，宜家的成功，是因为它让“价值共创”(value co-production)成为可能。这个不太恰当的词汇，部分意思是指向顾客提供折扣，由他们自己组装家具。不过，它还有更多含义。宜家争取到顾客对其观点的认同：他们不仅能自己组装置物架，通过向他们提供卷尺、印刷近2亿个同时可以作为设计手册的商品目录，顾客还能自己设计时髦的居住空间。宜家还投入巨大精力，帮助供应商和设计师发挥自己的作用，而不是被动购买他们提供的东西，然后转手卖给顾客。

    我们都知道，这个模式很有效。多数成功的模式都易于抄袭，但这个模式属于例外，而这就是其中的高明之处。从很多方面来看，宜家提供的似乎都是一个过时的商业模式：相比于20年前，我们的时间更紧张了，但有更多的钱可以花在房子上。当一套普通的伦敦住宅就需要30万英镑的时候，一套廉价的沙发凭什么依然具有吸引力？

    然而，宜家依然生意兴隆，证明了竞争者要向挤进这块业务是多么困难。这块业务已经成为一群经济行为人的中心，所有人都奋力追寻着同一个目标：为来自克罗伊登的史迪夫(Steve)和爱丽丝(Alice)搭建一间有个性的起居室。

    没有多少科技企业能够用同样的方法成功动员一支“价值共创者”大军。微软(Microsoft)是最重要的例外，它创造了一个平台，支持无数其它软件公司的努力，同时也得到了它们的支持。游戏机生产商与游戏开发商存亡与共。eBay是一个老派的互联网公司，建立了几乎无人可以撼动的地位：买家去eBay是因为卖家在那里，卖家去eBay是因为买家在那里。

    有了这样的市场地位，不可避免地会带来利用这一地位的诱惑。微软与反垄断当局的斗争世人皆知。Facebook新的广告系统“Beacon”会把你访问过的商业网站告诉你的朋友；这个项目在用户之中引发了小小的叛乱。宜家很擅长通过迷宫一样的店铺设计来引导顾客。顾客不喜欢，但没有更好的选择，只能忍着。

    也许，我们的容忍会有限度。我与Facebook的热恋简短而乏味。宜家呢？我只想说，我的孩子不是在宜家的床上孕育出来的。到此为止