Last week I attended the NBER's Economics of IT and Digitization conference at its Summer Institute. There were lots of interesting papers but I wanted to focus on one, in particular, that demonstrated how important seemingly small facts were for policy conclusions. This paper was by Jason Chan and Anindya Ghose and it explored the …
Continue reading "Small facts can cause big changes to conclusions"
A few weeks ago NPR staffer Emily White blogged unapologetically that, like many members of generation, she had never paid for music. This prompted a firestorm of response and attention, including a few New York Times pieces ( here, here, and here). Musician David Lowery responded eloquently and forcefully, piquing my curiosity about him. It …
Here is an insightful article about the changing economics of privacy. It comes from Jeff John Roberts, one of the more insightful online reporters and commentators in tech today. Here is a quote: "It has become cheap and easy to pry into the lives of others at the same time that protecting our own lives …
In the past I have expressed my opinion that Dropbox did not appear to have sufficient power in the market to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft (see here and here). The reason was that while for Dropbox its service was a product for others it was merely a feature and so they …
Tom Edsall does a nice job summarizing the increasing hollowing out of the job market in his New York Times column today. The employment/population ratio has fallen drastically since 1999 even as Real GDP hit an all time high this month. Edsall quotes Andy McAfee and me arguing that technological progress is part of the …
Kellogg Insight's Editor, Tim De Chant, and I sat down to discuss tiered pricing for broadband. It was a pretty interesting conversation, and Tim distilled it into a blog post. If you are curious to see the original post and other posts by Tim, see his blog, Expertly Wrapped. With Tim's permission, here is a …
I have to admit that I did not think that the potentially historic announcements on the Higgs boson today would provide a platform to discuss the all important issue of fonts. But the decision to use the iconic, Comic Sans, in the PowerPoint presentation today by CERN scientists have brought typefaces front and centre. And …
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As pretty much everyone knows, it is hard to face the choice, several times a day, of whether to choose ‘fit’ or ‘fat’ food or something in between. When I noticed that my wife was taking pictures of her food in order to keep a record of how she was doing diet-wise I wondered if …
Continue reading "Can the wisdom of crowds transform your diet?"
[This post originally appeared at HBR on 3rd July 2012] Music publishers have long realized that consumers need help with finding new music. Radio played this role, and it was a source of revenue too. The placement of songs in movies and other media also fueled demand. The music video evolved from television shows to …
John Gruber points us to a prediction made by Clay Christensen 5 years ago about the iPhone: That’s why they’ve [Apple] been successful. But just watch the [competitors'] advertisements that you hear for the ability to download music onto your mobile phone. Music on the mobile phone has to be downloaded in an open architecture …
Continue reading "Clay Christensen on the iPhone: Wrong about success but right about disruption"
Digitopoly 