However, up until now "everything" didn't include data.

The gigantic profusion of digital information in the modern world is the price of doing business. It stands to reason then that organizing this data in such a way that it can be mined for patterns and insights to bring efficiencies to bear, will be a major benefit and competitive advantage for those entities agile enough to seize the opportunity.

There's another problem with commoditizing data so it can be sold in a marketplace like any other asset and that's accessibility.