Competition in the Digital Age
Last week, Slate launched its long awaited redesign. For a site that is in my regular ‘morning tab’ browser run, to me, this was a big deal. According to the commentary by David Plotz, Slate was motivated by beauty and ease. There is much to like about the new design (for instance, getting rid of …
Continue reading "How Slate's redesign misses the lessons of Prego"
Susan Athey, Emilio Calvano and myself finally released our NBER working paper this week on the impact of the Internet on the news media. Having chatted with a journalist trying to decode our maths -- which by the way was critical in developing our theory -- I thought I'd link here to some more readable …
Tomorrow, Apple look set to introduce some new iPhones including an iPhone 5S (its flagship) and an iPhone 5C. The latter is seemingly a break from the past. From the rumours, it will be a lower cost iPhone but with colourful options possibly targeting the Chinese market where Apple finally signed on China Mobile as …
That's Paul Krugman's claim today in the NYT. He argues that when Steve Ballmer took over, Microsoft was secure in its core business on the basis of operating system -- applications network externalities that raised switching costs for consumers. That led to Microsoft being blind to new developments, such as the smart phone, and hence …
Continue reading "Is Microsoft of the 1990s similar to Apple of today?"
With Google Reader closing down in just a few days, I have had lots of questions regarding where to switch to. I have waited until the last minute because there is innovation going on at a rapid pace as other competitors suddenly see opportunity. The answer of which feed reader to use really depends. I …
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 …
[Note: This post is 'wonkish,' a word which here means you may have to think harder than normal while reading it.] One thing I learned at the Kauffman Economic Bloggers Forum last week is that there is angst among the professional (i.e., non-academic) bloggers about citation and re-stating the arguments of other bloggers. It was …
Last summer I expressed an interest in meeting musician David Lowery to discuss the evolution of the music industry. Long story short: we’re getting together at the University of Minnesota next Friday, April 19 for an event entitled “Resolved: Napster is the Best/Worst Thing That's Ever Happened to Music.” The event title is a bit …
With the looming loss of Google Reader, there has been a rethink of "what is it good for anyway?" Some felt that RSS has long been a poor medium for reading. They long for formatting that is consistent with the way an author intended. There have been some Google Reader alternatives that have provided that …
Digitopoly 