Discussions about ad-blockers are all the rage. This is because Apple's new iOS 9 allows you to put content blockers on the Safari web browser. Thus, this technology is brought to the mobile web; something one can guess Google will be reluctant to do on Android. Anyhow, I wrote about the broad issues here. I, …
Why is Apple a copycat?
Apple is a copycat. There I said it. Well, not in everything. Yesterday they made some big announcements including the updated OS for the Apple Watch and also new iPhones with an entirely new dimension of interaction that rivals will surely struggle to implement. And along with that they will use the front screen as …
Nathan Rosenberg and the Innovation System
Today brought the sad news that Nathan Rosenberg -- one of the finest economic historians of the last fifty years -- passed away. He was 87. I learned economic history from Rosenberg when I was at Stanford University. That and his writings had a profound influence on me and also on many students that passed through his …
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Should Facebook be paying us?
Probably not. In the New Yorker, Tim Wu argues for yes. His argument is simple. Facebook make money because they collect data that their users freely give them. For the most valuable innovation at the heart of Facebook was probably not the social network (Friendster thought of that) so much as the creation of a …
How sure are we that Ad-blocking software will ruin the free Internet?
Ad-blocking software is to the advertising based Internet what Tivo was supposedly to broadcast television: with a little investment, users can consume content without the ads. As Simon Anderson and I pointed out some years ago in a paper published in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, since ads are annoying, users will have an incentive …
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Google Plus exemplifies why self-disruption doesn't work
Google is slowly but clearly shuttering Google Plus; its latest failed social network. In many respects this is not a surprise. As I wrote upon its launch in 2011, Google Plus demonstrated precisely why Google didn't get social as it, by default, asked people to think about restricting their social activity rather than by encouraging …
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Is Apple at antitrust risk from music streaming?
Just a decade or so since the music industry was disrupted by the digital world, it is well into another business model disruption over streaming. And like that previous disruption, it seems that artists are wondering where all the money is going. This was the topic of David Byrne's New York Times opinion piece this …
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Who is Jet.com out to kill?
Last week, Jet.com, a new retail outlet created by the founder of diapers.com was launched. It basically offers many household staples for very low prices and what is more, the more you buy, the lower the price goes. The idea is similar to Costco or Sam's Club. Jet.com asks members to pay $50 per year …
Streamlining patent examination
At the NBER Summer Institute there was an interesting panel session on patent reform. One of the issues was the speed and cost of the patent examination process. The usual intuition is that we want this to be as speedy and thorough as possible but that is a goal that is unlikely given budget constraints. …
The Defenestration of Search
[This post was first published at HBR.org on 10th July 2015]. Why aren’t things better? This is something that I often feel these days when searching for information on the internet. And it is especially something I feel when I am searching for products where quality matters. This applies to restaurants, tradespeople, and books, for …
Digitopoly 