Competition in the Digital Age
Amazon just made official its Kindle Unlimited service that, for $9.99 per month, offers subscribers unlimited access to, at the moment, 600,000 books (including some big titles like Harry Potter). Basically, this is the Netflix model applied to reading and, from my perspective, it is interesting because I predicted it two years ago in Information …
Continue reading "It's here: Netflix for Books or 'The Library'"
The title of this post reads like the title of a typical Harvard Business School (HBS) case. Actually, if I wrote "Harvard Business School and the Online Threat (A)" that would be more appropriate. But while I toyed with the idea of writing this in that style, for example: Professor Clay Christensen …
Continue reading "Harvard Business School and the Online Threat"
And by that I don't mean that music artists are not producing music but they are changing their businesses. This week the Apple-Beats acquisition became official. At the same time, there was news that Beats was not taking its design team with them to Apple. Suffice it to say, with that went my theory that …
Continue reading "Are music artists exiting the music business?"
Yesterday, Google pivoted on self-driving cars. Yes, I know we don't normally describe established firms as 'pivoting' but the notion applies when the same core idea (in this case, autonomous vehicles) is reapplied to a different customer set. For the self-driving car, this moved from retrofitting existing cars to Google building its own new and …
Continue reading "Will regulators really hold back self-driving cars?"
“I think the model will change and you won’t pay for the window of availability. A movie will come out and you will have 17 days, that’s exactly three weekends, which is 95% of the revenue for 98% of movies. On the 18th day, these movies will be available everywhere ubiquitously and you will pay …
A month ago, the music group, Wu-Tang Clan decided to do something we 'economics of digitisation' folks have always dreamed about: they decided to make just one unit of their next album. The plan is for the album to first make a tour of festivals, museums and galleries (no dates or locations have been set, however), …
Continue reading "The first unit is expensive: Wu-Tang Clan edition"
The new economics/politics/news website, Vox.com, launched a week ago. It is one of many independent ventures cropping up that are well financed and are attempting to give us the future of the news media. What I have been particular interested in is where it will be in this space. And here are my thoughts based …
Google has announced a plan to sell Motorola to Lenovo for just under three billion dollars. Google paid more than twelve billion only two years ago, and many commentators have declared that this is Larry Page’s first big bet, and potentially his first big experiment to go sour. Even the best reporters characterize the strategy …
Continue reading "Google and Motorola in the Wake of Nortel"
Up until recently, there were two "new economy" blogging models. The first was the independent blog (such as this one and the thousands of others that have populated our lives over the last decade). The second was the blog mixed in with traditional media. The latter started to grow with the Huffington Post to Forbes …
Continue reading "It begins: evolving the blogging/journalism space"
That's the question I asked myself this morning as I walked past one of my beloved Nest thermostats. When I see my Nest of a morning, I don't have to adjust anything. It is already working just as I want it to do. I can just look at it admiringly knowing that something I used …
Digitopoly 