Competition in the Digital Age
What happened in the world of IT? Who deserves notoriety for their behavior? It is time to review 2019, and, while we are at it, make a mockery of the most noteworthy. After all, the world is already messed up, so at least let's have a bit of fun. Reminder: The awards generate no money, …
At a conference in Brussels last week I made a short speech about Facebook and its poor approach to regulatory management and innovation. I refer at the end to this paper from The Hamilton Project.
It is very easy to posit a sense of exploitation when it comes to data. Try this for size: "Networks are relying on data by individuals but they aren't being paid and this is making those networks profitable." Substitute "plantations" for "networks," "labour" for "data," and "individuals" for "slaves" and you get the picture. Of …
Continue reading "It is far from clear that requiring payments for data makes sense"
Apple announced two major changes to the App Store for its various software platforms (iPhone, iPad and OSX). The first would be to allow search based advertising. The second would be to reform subscription pricing. These are large changes as I will explain below. Search-based Advertising A little appreciated fact is that apps themselves have …
[reposted from HBR Blogs] To this day, Microsoft Office remains the dominant office software suite, a position it has held since the 1990s. While competitors have emerged to appeal to different customer niches (Google Docs with collaboration or iWork for Mac users), for many people the value of using Office lies in the fact that …
While I wouldn't want this to be a general statement: platform-owned apps can be really terrible. Why? Because they don't permit level-playing field competition between their own apps and third party apps on their platform. And that lack of competition is costly; maybe even for the platforms themselves. Consider a first example: iTunes. iTunes is …
Probably not. In the New Yorker, Tim Wu argues for yes. His argument is simple. Facebook make money because they collect data that their users freely give them. For the most valuable innovation at the heart of Facebook was probably not the social network (Friendster thought of that) so much as the creation of a …
So what happens when on the same day, Uber announces that it is investing heavily in self-driving cars and Google is rumoured to be developing a ride sharing app? Media chaos focussing on a forthcoming robot war between Google and Uber over travellers. The media decided Uber was going to replace its drivers with robots. …
Continue reading "Uber versus Google: Far from self-driving competition"
New Years Eve has come and gone and with it the annual discussion regarding whether Uber's 'surge pricing' is justifiable (for example, here is Slate and here is an excellent set of points from Tim B. Lee at Vox. For the uninitiated, 'surge pricing' occurs when Uber's algorithms automatically raise the price of rides to …
In recent days, since their PR troubles, there has been much discussion as to why Uber seems to be so aggressive. Reasons ranged from being inept, to the challenges of fighting politics against taxi regulations to a claim that Uber’s market has a ‘winner take all’ nature. It is this last one that is of particular interest because it …
Digitopoly 