Data's not the new oil: it's worthless.

Far from being the new oil, data has no inherent value, writes Benedict Evans. There is no single thing called 'data': it's not a homogenous commodity, like oil, but lots of different collections of information.

"Siemens has wind turbine telemetry and Transport for London has ticket swipes, and you can’t use the turbine telemetry to plan a new bus route. If you gave both sets of data to Google or Tencent, that wouldn’t help them build a better image recognition system. "

Data that is useful for one thing is probably not useful for anything else. Even then, single pieces of data are only valuable in aggregate and in context.

Data is not the new oil, it's just an ingredient in many successful software companies.