Competition in the Digital Age
Prairie Home Companion begins with a mischievous maxim that all children in Lake Wobegon are above average. The equivalent adage in Silicon Valley goes like this: Every insider acts like an outsider. This adage reflects mythology as well as savvy public relations. The largest technology firms possess names recognized in most households, and they perceive …
Did the rise of free information technology improve GDP? It is commonly assumed that it did. After all, the Internet has changed the way we work, play, and shop. Smartphones and free apps are ubiquitous. Many forms of advertising moved online quite a while ago and support gazillions of “free” services. Free apps changed leisure long ago—just ask any teenager or any parent …
It has long been recognized that networked services contain weak-link vulnerabilities. That is, the performance of any frontier device depends on the performance of every contributing component and service. This column focuses on one such phenomenon, which goes by the label “congestion.” No, this is not a new type of allergy, but, as with a …
Hello good readers! It is time once again for a retrospective look at the top ten digital events of 2016. And what a year it was – elections, political intrigue, hacking, and more! Some very impressive people and action deserve their just rewards, i.e., fifteen seconds of snarky comments. The award is called a Sally. …
From what I can gather from several recent articles, many serious pundits have arguments with the views of ‘techno-optimists.’ A techno-optimist appears to be somebody who has blind faith in the power of technology to cure all ills, and particularly, to create economic growth. (See e.g., here, here, here, here, or here, and there are many more...) …
Continue reading "Ten Open Questions for the Techno-Optimist"
It is not as if my wife and I intentionally seek to go off the grid. Rather, we possess a taste for mountains, National Parks, and the geologic oddities of the western US. As it happens, these type of locations tend to lack full support for the modern Internet. These locations also drive my teenage children …
Continue reading "On and off the grid – with digitally literate teenagers"
Human existence changed irreversibly after the invention of indoor plumbing and the municipal supply of water and sewage. The advent of electricity also changed life as we know it, and so did automobiles, the telephone, penicillin, pasteurization, the polio vaccine, and much more. In his book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth; The US …
When an established firm aspires to experiment in a radical direction, management gurus recommend opening a skunk works—an organizational home for high-priority original thinking and projects. It is housed away from the organization’s main operations, sometimes in secret or with organizational barriers. Typically the projects involve something of value to the future but are not …
Princeton University Press just published my book, with its self-explanatory title, How the Internet Became Commercial (2015). Sometimes I am asked to explain the “secret sauce” of US commercial success. I point to the treatment of outsiders. There were few barriers to putting their contributions to good use. Mainstream firms were more than willing to …
Continue reading "Insiders, Outsiders, and an Existentialist"
It is time, dear readers, for a review of the year in technology. And what a year it was. Yes, indeed, information technology in 2015 had its share of strange and notable people, events, and ideas! Who deserves awards? Below you will find a dozen winners. How are these awards chosen? On what criteria? Be …
Digitopoly 