Competition in the Digital Age
Yesterday, Google announced its "spring cleaning" whereby it, usually, discards products most people had long thought discarded. Usually the products are Blackberry ones that don't really yield controversy. A few years back, Google retired Buzz which was generally regarded as a failure. Some product retirements are a little more troubling. Consider Google Wave as I wrote about in …
Continue reading "With Google Reader gone, is Google Scholar next?"
When the iPad first came out in 2010, Cory Doctorow said he would not buy one and advised others not to do so either. He had lots of reasons but for this post I want to address Reason No.1: Incumbents made bad revolutionaries Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. …
Andrew Sullivan is one of the world's best known and well-read bloggers. Or is he a journalist. I have no idea. Nor do I really care. He writes things and people read them. Up until recently, Sullivan has worked on mainstream publishing platforms like Time and The Atlantic and then to the less mainstream Daily …
Macro Arment, the founder of one of my favourite apps, Instapaper, launched a magazine in Apple's Newstand app last year called The Magazine. Thusfar, The Magazine has received much discussion with regard to two things. First, it was accessible via an app-only subscription of $1.99 per month (there were two issues per month each containing …
For several years, commentators have forecast that the rise in smartphones and tablets, as well as Facebook, would upend the structure of the gaming market. A variety of novel adroit aliens and irascible animals symbolically represent the new order, while new companies from new genres alter the identities of suppliers. Methinks that all the talk …
I have just spent the last couple of days in New York at O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing conference. This is a fairly large gathering of publishers, authors and technology providers for them. I was a little out of place there as an economist academic but did have a healthy audience for my talk …
Netflix launched a new, self-produced, series, House of Cards. There are many things unique about it. First, it is exclusive to Netflix. Second, Netflix released the whole series in one block last week. It is the second bit that I believe may turn out to be a real issue. From the NYT: Netflix’s release strategy …
Yesterday I was at Oxford University presenting at a BBC Trust Seminar on the Economics of Broadcasting hosted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. As it turned out, the discussion mainly focussed on the justification for the BBC continuing as a public entity. I hadn't given that subject much thought considering the …
Yesterday, Facebook announced "Graph Search." It's an engineering name that is accurate and communicates nothing to the general public. Nonetheless, the engineering face stops with the name as the feature itself is designed with humans in mind. Facebook's own introduction describes graph search nicely. It is basically a search engine for social networks -- in …
Like most of the other economists, for the last couple of days I have been at the annual Allied Social Sciences Association conference in San Diego. This is a gathering of mostly economists with hundreds of papers being presented, strewn across multiple hotels. A staple of the meetings was the 'book.' This was a 500 …
Digitopoly 