I love talking about business models because in the end, it's usually the best business model, not the best technology, that wins the day. And digital transformation has the potential to reinvent business models by leveraging superior customer, product and operational insights to disrupt industry value chains and disintermediate customer relationships (see Figure 1). As the title of the book "Moneyball" states ("Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game"), some of these reinvented business models will be based on "winning an unfair game". We have historical lessons about how Robber Barons[1] of the late 1800's created and won "an unfair game" that gave them monopoly power over suppliers, customers and competitors. To create this unfair game, Robber Barons leveraged a concept called "vertical integration" to dominate industry value chains and construct indissoluble customer and supplier dependencies. Let's review the lessons of these Robber Barons to understand how digital transformation might enable modern companies to win the digital unfair game.

At first glance you could be forgiven for seeing The Outer Worlds as another wacky space opera, complete with eccentric characters and off-beat humor. But to leave it there would be to belie a game with over 20 years of history behind it. The team behind The Outer Worlds has worked on some of the most popular RPGs in the world. Producers Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky are credited with the creation of the prestigious Fallout franchise, with Cain working as creator, producer, and lead programmer, and Boyarsky serving as the lead artist responsible for Fallout's signature 1950's style, in addition to helping oversee the game's overall direction. Yet despite being billed by Boyarsky himself as the spiritual successor to Fallout, specifically Obsidian Entertainment's last entry in the series, the much-loved Fallout: New Vegas, The Outer Worlds is most definitely its own mad-cap experience.