Writing in the New Yorker, Tim Wu argues that ad-avoidance will always be present but won't necessarily be a disaster for media industries. The individual benefits are obvious. But is avoiding ads responsible or sustainable? It makes the advertising industry nervous, and many in the content industry, joined by some academics, see ad-avoiders as content-killers. The …
Is the iPad 2 the greatest tech product ever?
Two days ago, Apple announced this year's line up of iPads. The new iPads are 64 bit, have Retina display screens and are light (well the iPad Mini is a little heavier but it is not bigger and does have a better screen). This was all expected. What was unexpected was that Apple did not …
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HealthCare.gov really is the purest political failure
While the US was distracted in its negotiations over whether to have a government, the health insurance exchange, HealthCare.gov, launched. It was beset by technical issues. Put simply, it couldn't handle the load. This isn't surprising. The right way to design a site like this is for robustness in on-going use -- that is, for …
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HBR Responds and I React
The HBR saga continues today with HBR responding both in the Financial Times and to me personally about some of the issues that have been raised this week. To recap, here are links to: My initial post My clarification My Financial Times article The HBR response in the Financial Times today was written by the …
Clarifying the issues with Harvard Business Review
My post last week on Harvard Business School Publishing's pricing rules for Harvard Business Review articles used for teaching managed to grab lots of attention. That was, of course, my hope given my use of the 'evil' tag. While that seemed like a bold claim, sometimes you need to draw emotion to get everyone focussed. …
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Once there was a tree … Shel Silverstein's estate and publishers
... and this time the tree wasn't happy. There was this boy, San Diego State University professor Joseph Thomas, who wanted to use some branches of the tree to build a biography of Shel Silverstein. Now even though in this case, the tree could still live on happily with all of its branches and all …
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Harvard Business School Publishing crosses the 'evil' academic line
I am pretty sure that Harvard Business School spends some time teaching its students about Google's "Don't be evil" business statement. While I am also pretty sure that it doesn't take it at face value, I would be very surprised if it challenged not being evil as a worthy goal. If their attempts to introduce …
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Gladwell misses some game theory
Re-published from Medium Malcolm Gladwell has a new book out entitled David and Goliath. It is about underdogs and is based on the classic David vs Goliath setting in which a shepherd, David, defeats a giant, Goliath. I have yet to read the whole book — this isn’t a review — but in the very first chapter I was struck …
How Slate's redesign misses the lessons of Prego
Last week, Slate launched its long awaited redesign. For a site that is in my regular ‘morning tab’ browser run, to me, this was a big deal. According to the commentary by David Plotz, Slate was motivated by beauty and ease. There is much to like about the new design (for instance, getting rid of …
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Is upfront app pricing over?
Marco Arment, who has been responsible for some popular apps including Instapaper, is a leader in the app world on discussions of mobile app strategy. For that reason, when he makes a pronouncement that tends to start a discussion. And in today's instalment, he pronounced, upfront mobile app pricing over. What is upfront app pricing? …
