The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam would like its art to be used properly even if that reduces its commercial opportunities: Many museums post their collections online, but the Rijksmuseum here has taken the unusual step of offering downloads of high-resolution images at no cost, encouraging the public to copy and transform its artworks into stationery, T-shirts, tattoos, plates …
Revenge Editing and Wikipedia
Unless you regularly read Salon, you probably missed last week's interesting article about anextraordinary case of revenge editing on Wikipedia. This article should matter to anyone who cares about Wikipedia, and, more generally, it should matter to anyone who cares about the long run success of open platforms for accumulating content. Look, the world is …
The Anatomy of a Digital Business Negotiation
The US DOJ's pursuit of Apple as a "ringleader" in eBook price fixing continues to fascinate me. This week the DOJ released an email exchange between Steve Jobs and James Murdoch (of News Corp) that took place a few days before the launch of the iPad in 2010. Now Apple (and I should add Google) …
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Tumblr and Yahoo's portal strategy
Last week I posited that Yahoo were engaging in a renewed portal strategy: basically, trying to be in a position to capture readers' attention for 30 minutes a day and, as a result, have a regular and manageable sales proposition to advertisers. Today, Yahoo announced it was buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Tumblr is generally …
Google's Multi-Front War
Today Larry Page at Google IO said he was tired of hearing about how Google is fighting with this company and that. "We should be building great things that don't exist. Not every new technology is zero-sum." But this was at the tail-end of Google's keynote at the conference that introduced a ton of new …
Will Yahoo! return to its portal roots?
My latest at Medium. Many tech writers have a soft spot for Yahoo!. It was one of the first big dotcom companies and it didn’t succeed enough to be seen as a real threat to much. What is more, beyond its first few years as The Player in the portal market, it has been hard …
Goodbye Software Ownership?
Adobe announced yesterday that it was moving to a subscription model for what appears to be virtually all of its software. A subscription model has existed for about a year now; basically, for $50 per month ($600 per year) you get all of their creative software. For students and teachers, there are discounts. I subscribed …
Digitopoly 