Competition in the Digital Age
A little while back, Scott Stern and I wrote a paper that asked "Is there a market for ideas?" The paper has since been published but is also available here. The paper noted that while many ideas are traded there do not appear to be organised markets to facilitate such trading. For patents, there have …
Continue reading "Is there a market for ideas? Apptopia edition"
In the past I have expressed my opinion that Dropbox did not appear to have sufficient power in the market to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft (see here and here). The reason was that while for Dropbox its service was a product for others it was merely a feature and so they …
I have to admit that I did not think that the potentially historic announcements on the Higgs boson today would provide a platform to discuss the all important issue of fonts. But the decision to use the iconic, Comic Sans, in the PowerPoint presentation today by CERN scientists have brought typefaces front and centre. And …
Continue reading "Of typefaces and scientific communication"
John Gruber points us to a prediction made by Clay Christensen 5 years ago about the iPhone: That’s why they’ve [Apple] been successful. But just watch the [competitors'] advertisements that you hear for the ability to download music onto your mobile phone. Music on the mobile phone has to be downloaded in an open architecture …
Continue reading "Clay Christensen on the iPhone: Wrong about success but right about disruption"
It turns out Apple has an answer to this question: 514,000 in the US. 304,000 of those are either jobs at Apple or at companies that supply them. Another 210,000 are iOS app economy jobs but let's face it, those aren't likely to be full time. So what are we to make of this? The …
Today I was fortunate enough to attend a lunch where the speaker was The Economist editor-in-chief, John Micklethwaite. His talked was wide ranging but, not surprisingly, what interested me is the question he received about disruption in his own industry. The Economist, of course, is faring well especially compared with newspapers. He attributed this to …
Continue reading "How agnostic is The Economist about print versus digital?"
It seems that you can't go anywhere these days without seeing a new pretender to a digital revolution in education. Just this week, Harvard and MIT launched an online initiative, edX. It follows Stanford University's digital education initiatives and the start-ups it has spawned, CourseRA and Udacity. Apple (with iTunes U) and now Microsoft (with its …
Continue reading "The Next Digital Revolution in Education? Grading"
Over at Forbes on my Parentonomics blog I recount the experience my 11 year old son had taking Stanford's Game Theory course. My take-a-away is that designing online content and also assessment is a real challenge and it is unlikely that normal course content will simply translate over to the new medium.
Just before he stepped down as CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs tried to buy DropBox for Apple. But he and Dropbox founder, Drew Houston, had a dispute about what DropBox was. Jobs had claimed it was "a feature, not a product." I agreed, much to the consternation of some. This week saw the "feature" story gain weight …
In today's New York Times, David Brooks argues that a competitive and creative spirit may be substitutes. We live in a culture that nurtures competitive skills. And they are necessary: discipline, rigor and reliability. But it’s probably a good idea to try to supplement them with the skills of the creative monopolist: alertness, independence and …
Digitopoly 