Competition in the Digital Age
Yesterday, Apple announced iOS7, the latest version of its mobile operating system. It was a large change but perhaps the most interesting bit was Apple's continuation of its rather tense relationship with the app developer community. To be sure, Apple has enabled that community and handed them $10 billion in revenue since 2008. However, once …
Continue reading "Is Apple harming the feature innovation ecosystem?"
From a preliminary paper by Michael Baye, Babur De los Santo and Matthijs Wildenbeest: What it shows is average book prices over time for paperbacks and then eBooks sold under the agency model and the wholesale model. Now I should stress it is average book prices and it is not weighted by quantity sold. …
Continue reading "A Puzzling Graph on eBook Prices and the DOJ Case"
Last year I discussed the economics of spam and suggested: Seen in that light perhaps we should see [spam] as criminal entrepreneurship. What is great about that is we know a lot about how to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation and so to deal with spam we just need to throw that into reverse. Countermeasures make …
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 …
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) …
Continue reading "The Anatomy of a Digital Business Negotiation"
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Today, this popped up on my Twitter feed. Bill Amend, the author of Foxtrot, was trying to use the Kindle Comic Creator tool to publish his successful collections on the Kindle. He took a close look at the terms and conditions and found that (a) because his collection was over 10MB the minimum price permitted …
Digitopoly 