I’m an avid reader of Billboard Magazine. I find the reporting well informed and the writing lively, on top of the fact that the subject matter – the music industry – fascinates me. So it was with some concern that I read a recent Billboard article claiming that my recent study with Luis Aguiar, “Streaming …
Traditional disruption theory and predictions
Regular readers will know that I have been focussed on disruption as a phenomenon where successful firms fail precisely because they pursue the good strategies that made them successful in the first place. My forthcoming book deals exclusively with that issue. But there is a group of people -- mostly outside of academia -- who …
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The Disruption Dilemma: Available for Pre-Order
My latest book, The Disruption Dilemma, is now available for pre-order on Amazon (hard-cover only). It will be published by MIT Press in March 2016 and there will be an electronic version available by then. The book arose out of a blog post I wrote last year but also as part of a desire to …
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"Information Wants to be Free": The history of that quote
Last year Steve Levy wrote "The Definitive Story of Information Wants to be Free." It is an interesting reflection on that phrase and its origins. The exact quote arose in a conversation between Stewart Brand and Steve Wosniak at the first hackers conference in 1984 and was recorded by Levy as this: On the one hand …
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Broadband usage caps are probably inefficient
In Slate, Eli Dourado has a post in support of Comcast's move to cap broadband usage at 300GB per month unless you want to pay $10 for a little more or $30 for unlimited. I have played the rational economist explains to consumers why a restriction is good for them card more times than I …
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Those Horrible Apps
While I wouldn't want this to be a general statement: platform-owned apps can be really terrible. Why? Because they don't permit level-playing field competition between their own apps and third party apps on their platform. And that lack of competition is costly; maybe even for the platforms themselves. Consider a first example: iTunes. iTunes is …
The Romer Model turns 25
25 years ago this month Paul Romer's paper, "Endogenous Technological Change" was published in the Journal of Political Economy. After over 20,000 citations, it is one of the most influential economics papers of that period. The short version of what that paper did was to provide a fully specified model whereby technological change (i.e., the …
Digitopoly 