What did Facebook have that Twitter did not? Ben Thompson thinks that it was focus on the news feed and not exploiting it when Twitter had the lead on mobile. He argues that failure has constrained it to this very day and appears to be pessimistic that there is anything Twitter can do to recover. …
Insiders, Outsiders, and an Existentialist
Princeton University Press just published my book, with its self-explanatory title, How the Internet Became Commercial (2015). Sometimes I am asked to explain the “secret sauce” of US commercial success. I point to the treatment of outsiders. There were few barriers to putting their contributions to good use. Mainstream firms were more than willing to …
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Gender Discrimination in Scientific Credit
Last week I gave the Suzanne Scotchmer Memorial Lecture in Toulouse. I chose as my subject, my paper with Fiona Murray on "Markets for Scientific Attribution" because it was part of a research line that was one of Suzanne's last discussions before she passed away a few years ago. The topic of that research line …
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A word about #TweetFlap2016
As a professor who has to grade my belief is that word limits are good. Character limits are even better and I'll be damned if anyone will tell me differently. So when Twitter leaked or something that it was thinking of raising the character limit by more than 7,000% (from 140 characters to 10,000) I …
Creative Destruction and Inequality
In yesterday's post, I reacted to Paul Graham's much talked about essay on inequality by suggesting that the premise -- entrepreneurship causes inequality -- is far from obvious. Indeed, I conjectured that if things were working as they should, entrepreneurship would tend to decrease inequality. My argument was based on where the entrepreneur started in …
The Entrepreneurship/Inequality Myth
Paul Graham, best known as a founder of Y-Combinator, likes to ruminate on many topics. He favours the essay rather than the tweet. And he has been hard at work on two essays recently; one on structural change in the US economy and the other on inequality. While I suspect they are both coming from …
Top dozen technology events of 2015
It is time, dear readers, for a review of the year in technology. And what a year it was. Yes, indeed, information technology in 2015 had its share of strange and notable people, events, and ideas! Who deserves awards? Below you will find a dozen winners. How are these awards chosen? On what criteria? Be …
Top Posts of 2015
As is traditional, here are the Top Posts of 2015 at Digitopoly The Romer Model turns 25 Why the iPhone confounds disruption theorists Uber, sharing and the compensation mechanism Nathan Rosenberg and the Innovation System The Organisational Choice of PowerPoint versus Excel Mathiness: A Guide for the Perplexed Economics in One Lesson: Nash Are we …
Star Trek's Ground Zero Copyright Battle
News today that Paramount and CBS -- the owners of Star Trek -- are suing the makers of Axanar, an independent Star Trek film. This is no ordinary fan film. Instead, it is a productiont that has received more than $1 million in crowdfunding. Moreover, it is not intended for commercial release. It will be …
Who should control your car's software
Cory Doctorow has an interesting piece in The Guardian on the ability of car owners/users to alter the software in their car. That is the broad issue but of course he writes about it in the context of the coming autonomous vehicles. Doctorow begins by throwing out the red herring that is the trolley problem …
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