Competition in the Digital Age
Last week Apple realised iOS 7, the latest version of its mobile operating system. It was a very large update reflecting the design choices of Johnny Ive rather than Steve Jobs. I have been using iOS 7 for about six weeks now and I can say that it is a pleasure to use. It feels …
Continue reading "iOS7 is great for developers but Apple's own apps continue to suffer"
Just a pointed to an interesting new paper by Anja Lambrecht and Kanishka Misra who examine ESPN's online paywall. Plummeting advertising revenues have lead many online content providers to experiment with additional sources of revenues. Most often, firms aim to compensate for a loss in advertising revenues by charging consumers for access to online content. …
Instagram announced yesterday that it would be adding video to its now extremely popular (130 million user) app (acquired last year by Facebook). The video part works alot like Twitter's Vine in that you can only make short videos and that putting different angles together is very easy. That led many to suggest that Instagram …
Differentiation is a standard concept for analyzing competition. It describes a common situation, where one firm develops the ability to serve one type of customer in a market—say, buyers who will pay a lot to save time—while a competing firm serves another—say, budget-conscious buyers who are patient. Differentiation can describe common competitive behavior in technology …
Yesterday, Apple announced iOS7, the latest version of its mobile operating system. It was a large change but perhaps the most interesting bit was Apple's continuation of its rather tense relationship with the app developer community. To be sure, Apple has enabled that community and handed them $10 billion in revenue since 2008. However, once …
Continue reading "Is Apple harming the feature innovation ecosystem?"
The US DOJ's pursuit of Apple as a "ringleader" in eBook price fixing continues to fascinate me. This week the DOJ released an email exchange between Steve Jobs and James Murdoch (of News Corp) that took place a few days before the launch of the iPad in 2010. Now Apple (and I should add Google) …
Continue reading "The Anatomy of a Digital Business Negotiation"
Last week I posited that Yahoo were engaging in a renewed portal strategy: basically, trying to be in a position to capture readers' attention for 30 minutes a day and, as a result, have a regular and manageable sales proposition to advertisers. Today, Yahoo announced it was buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Tumblr is generally …
Today Larry Page at Google IO said he was tired of hearing about how Google is fighting with this company and that. "We should be building great things that don't exist. Not every new technology is zero-sum." But this was at the tail-end of Google's keynote at the conference that introduced a ton of new …
Last week I attended the annual Kauffman Foundation Economics and Financial Weblogging Forum in Kansas City. It was the first time I had met so many of those bloggers that I read daily. I learned that the non-academic bloggers are young, very young. One of them is just out of high school! They are also …
Wikipedia has as one of its defining characteristics, its openness. Anyone can edit it. Anyone can reverse someone else's edits. And that process has led to the encyclopaedic resource we have today. How Wikipedia works is still a bit of a mystery. But what appears to be the case is that a core group of volunteers …
Digitopoly 