As any MBA teacher will tell you, classroom participation is great for learning but incredibly hard to assess. Keeping track of activity let alone the quality of contributions in a transparent manner is very difficult. For my new Network and Digital Market Strategy course at Rotman (both MBA and undergrad), I decided to 'go virtual' …
Amazon's pricing play that leverages the cloud
Amazon.com have a tremendous set of assets. They have millions of customer accounts. They have a ton of existing relationships with publishers and content providers. Behind the scenes they are one of the leading cloud computing service providers servicing start-ups and established firms alike (including Netflix). And they have a market leading product -- the …
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Dilbert makes our iconic point
In today's comic, Dilbert makes one of the points implicit in our logo (see here for an explanation): albeit with the notion that forecasts and reality might go the other way.
From Dead to Digital
There is something about Google's latest partnership -- the digitization of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- that says it all about the digital age. Google have taken these 2000 odd year bits of parchment and have converted them to high resolution images. Now, rather than being forced to study them in sealed rooms in Israel …
Facebook moves to secure the platform
At its F8 developer's conference this week, Facebook announced some very extensive changes. Steve Levy's write-up covers the main details. All over the place, Facebook is moving to secure itself as a platform. Deep integration with application developers: most notably, integration with music services (Spotify and Rhapsody -- where are you iTunes?), integration with news …
Google buys Zagat. Thinks outside the algorithm
Today, Google announced that it had acquired Zagat, the popular restaurant ratings provider. It's an important move, more for what it tells us about Google and the evolution of its strategy than it does about the restaurant rating game. Let's step back and consider the previous narrative on Google and Zagat. Zagat rose to prominence by providing …
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Netflix and the perils of disruptive platforms
Netflix is the textbook case of a disruptive innovation. Initially, it recognized and solved the "travel problem" in DVD rentals but sacrificed immediacy (subscribers had to wait for their DVDs to arrive in the mail). Improvements in broadband penetration throughout the U.S. have helped the company move into online streaming. Now consumers could not only remain …
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Time to buy Apple
For the second time, Steve Jobs will move away from running the company he cofounded, Apple. If history is any judge, this won't go well for the company. But there are lots of reasons to think history will be a poor judge of Apple's future performance. Let's start with some similarities between this departure and …
How Twitter, Google and Apple walk a fine line in platform defense
Innovators who build platforms face a difficult set of trade-offs. To begin with, the very definition of a platform requires buy-in from others — and not simply from the consumers you hope will purchase your product. The consumers and suppliers of complementary products need to make real investments too, investments that will enhance the overall value of …
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Google+ comes up short
What problem does Google+ solve for consumers? The answer appears to be: nothing. And, therefore, it solves nothing for Google either. As with many of these social launches — an exception being the ill-fated Google Buzz — the launch of Google+ was limited. Like Gmail and Google Wave, Google relied on invites to scale initial users and …
Digitopoly 