Competition in the Digital Age
Amazon.com have a tremendous set of assets. They have millions of customer accounts. They have a ton of existing relationships with publishers and content providers. Behind the scenes they are one of the leading cloud computing service providers servicing start-ups and established firms alike (including Netflix). And they have a market leading product -- the …
Continue reading "Amazon's pricing play that leverages the cloud"
We don’t think of the Kindle Fire as a tablet. We think of it as a service. – Jeff Bezos The analysts predicted that Amazon would introduce its new Kindle Fire tablet today with an aggressive low price of $250 to $300, in line with low margin competitors like Samsung. They were wrong. Amazon priced …
In today's comic, Dilbert makes one of the points implicit in our logo (see here for an explanation): albeit with the notion that forecasts and reality might go the other way.
Moneyball is a huge hit, which doesn't happen too often to movies featuring an economics major who's good at statistics. It tells the true story of how the Oakland A's became a competitive team despite having a payroll less than 1/3 of the Yankees. They did it by using statistical techniques pioneered by sabermetrician Bill …
Not too long ago, there was a relatively long list of things machines couldn't do by themselves: play chess, read legal briefs, translate poetry, vacuum floors, drive cars, etc. But that list is getting shorter and shorter every year. The latest casualty may be writing newspaper articles. Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum at Northwestern's Intelligent Information …
For the second time, Steve Jobs will move away from running the company he cofounded, Apple. If history is any judge, this won't go well for the company. But there are lots of reasons to think history will be a poor judge of Apple's future performance. Let's start with some similarities between this departure and …
Japan's newest pop star, Aimi Eguchi, is a digital creation. For the past couple of decades, digital technologies have been responsible for skill biased technical change, automating and replacing routine, low-skill work while augmenting the demand for more skilled workers. Bank tellers, clerks and assembly line workers were early targets of automation, while rock stars and CEOs benefited from being …
Continue reading "Can Digital Technologies Replace Superstars?"
Recently, the satirical newspaper The Onion captured — and not for the first time — just what I wanted to write about in this post with its article "'The Economist' to Halt Production for Month to Let Readers Catch Up." Still, though, I think the five-issue-high pile of The Economist on my desk could tell us much about what …
Continue reading "In digital media, the commercial value of the pile"
If the last big revolution was replacing muscle power with machines, the next one is automating and augmenting more mental tasks. Henry Ford and compatriots replaced the horse, now Google is working to replace the driver. According to John Markoff in the New York Times, their self-driving cars have now logged over 140,000 miles on California …
Continue reading "Google is putting the "auto" into automobile"
Newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are currently experimenting with paywalls that prevent non-paying customers from accessing some content. But what if all customers could access the same content, but the "economy" (i.e. free) visitors saw ads and other clutter while the "business class" customers got a cleaner experience? Would that be a viable model? …
Digitopoly 