Competition in the Digital Age
This post was originally published at HBR.org and it is co-authored with Eric von Hippel. Recent corporate history is littered with successful established firms who failed to manage disruptive innovation even with full knowledge that it was coming. Kodak is a poster-child. They knew digital photography was the future and invested heavily in hybrid technology in …
Continue reading "Disruption can be managed if you are your own lead user"
The Daily was launched in February 2011 to great fanfare. It was the first iPad only newspaper (although it did have a web mirror but that was just for sharing). It had a simple price, $1 per week, and had a slick tablet interface. Apple promoted it very strongly and gave News Corp assistance in …
Sega's games have been available on iPhones etc for some time. Microsoft's Smart Glass interface with the XBox 360 is also available on an array of mobile platforms. But one significant hangout is Nintendo. Nintendo are to app games like The Beatles where for iPods. They are sticking with their traditional distribution channels well beyond …
Continuing on the MOOC discussion of this week, Tyler Cowen points me to this Inside Higher Education article about accreditation and MOOCs. The clearest path to college credit for massive open online courses may soon be through credit recommendations from the American Council of Education (ACE), which announced Tuesday that it will work with Coursera …
Continue reading "Accreditation and MOOCs: How about we just don't do it"
Two posts came out in the last day on online education. One is by Clay Shirky and the other is by Alex Tabarrok. Both are worth reading. Both make a similar point although in very different ways. They argue that critiques of massively online open courses (MOOCs) are misplaced because they are comparing them to …
The news yesterday that Disney was acquiring LucasFilm and along with it, the Star Wars franchise led many in the blogosphere, twitter and every sub-editor in the media jump for joy. Never before had so many puns become available for some many headlines in such diversity. But at the same time, there was the realisation …
Continue reading "I suggest a new strategy George. Let the mouse win."
This morning, I had a "someone is wrong on the Internet" moment. The someone was Clay Christensen, David Skok and James Allworth who wrote a long piece for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard entitled "Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism." The report is about the woes facing the newspaper industry and …
Continue reading "Media disruption: it is not journalism, it is advertising"
In an interesting post today, Alexis Madrigal reminds everyone that the Internet was social well before MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and Twitter. He pointed out that for him, the Internet was always social with chat rooms, forums and, of course, email. He is hardly alone. That was certainly my experience. The communication elements of the Internet …
Amazon had its new Kindle announcements today. The news is that prices came down; at least on devices. Basically, everything about Amazon is about getting their devices into people's hands. The baseline Kindle is now just $69. It is still not free and nor is it given away with Amazon prime for reasons I articulated …
Publishers have been slow to adopt DRM free eBooks even though experience in music publishing suggests a natural evolution. To be sure, part of this relates to Amazon's proprietary Kindle format that is involves DRM and that has enlisted major publishers behind it. But there are some big exceptions and some others including TOR books and …
Continue reading "Harvard Business Review Press goes DRM Free (and expensive)"
Digitopoly 