Firms in the smartphone market have been suing one another over patent violations. I cannot recall any other platform war that involved as many intellectual property disputes. Look, society grants patents as part of trade-off. A patent enhances the incentives to generate new invention by giving the inventor a temporary monopoly. That trade-off should never …
What CAN'T computers do?
Not too long ago, there was a relatively long list of things machines couldn't do by themselves: play chess, read legal briefs, translate poetry, vacuum floors, drive cars, etc. But that list is getting shorter and shorter every year. The latest casualty may be writing newspaper articles. Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum at Northwestern's Intelligent Information …
Sports stories written by algorithm
Have you suspected for some time that most writing about sporting events is formulaic? Well, suspect no more! It is possible to have a computer write a sports story merely from the box score. No seriously. It is. And there is some pretty interesting business economics in that example. Some professors from Northwestern figured out …
The Lexicon of Networking Economics
Economics rarely improves with reference to etymology, but an exception should be made for the economics of networks. Many valid but distinct definitions of “network economics” compete for attention. That causes confusion in academic writing and in public discourse. There are many symptoms of this confusion. Consider this one. When the late Senator Ted Stevens …
Google buys Zagat. Thinks outside the algorithm
Today, Google announced that it had acquired Zagat, the popular restaurant ratings provider. It's an important move, more for what it tells us about Google and the evolution of its strategy than it does about the restaurant rating game. Let's step back and consider the previous narrative on Google and Zagat. Zagat rose to prominence by providing …
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Netflix and the perils of disruptive platforms
Netflix is the textbook case of a disruptive innovation. Initially, it recognized and solved the "travel problem" in DVD rentals but sacrificed immediacy (subscribers had to wait for their DVDs to arrive in the mail). Improvements in broadband penetration throughout the U.S. have helped the company move into online streaming. Now consumers could not only remain …
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Time to buy Apple
For the second time, Steve Jobs will move away from running the company he cofounded, Apple. If history is any judge, this won't go well for the company. But there are lots of reasons to think history will be a poor judge of Apple's future performance. Let's start with some similarities between this departure and …
How Twitter, Google and Apple walk a fine line in platform defense
Innovators who build platforms face a difficult set of trade-offs. To begin with, the very definition of a platform requires buy-in from others — and not simply from the consumers you hope will purchase your product. The consumers and suppliers of complementary products need to make real investments too, investments that will enhance the overall value of …
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Google+ comes up short
What problem does Google+ solve for consumers? The answer appears to be: nothing. And, therefore, it solves nothing for Google either. As with many of these social launches — an exception being the ill-fated Google Buzz — the launch of Google+ was limited. Like Gmail and Google Wave, Google relied on invites to scale initial users and …
Apple's News Platform Battle
An interesting battle is looming over Apple's newspaper and magazines subscription pricing for iOS devices (notably the iPad). Apple's offer to publishers is simple. They can offer an app that allows consumers to buy individual issues of their content or to subscribe to it from within the app; the publisher sets the pricing. But Apple …
