Competition in the Digital Age
The New York Times reported recently that Amazon’s buying Goodreads, the largest book review site online. It’s easy to see the appeal of Goodreads to Amazon. Goodreads apparently has 10 million ratings and reviews of over 700,000 titles. This trove will bolster the already-copious product information that supports book discovery at Amazon.com. Moreover, Goodreads is a …
Continue reading "Am I the Only One Ambivalent about Amazon’s Acquisition of Goodreads?"
When I teach about platforms, Google is right up there in the examples. The search/advertising two-sided market is possibly the most successful in history (rivalling Windows). While it has had its challenges, Google's approach to advertising -- opening it up with tools for the long-tail of merchants as well as the long-tail of content providers …
Matt Yglesias has a way of identifying great questions quickly. Responding to Erik's widely discussed post on the low Kindle price yesterday, he writes: That said, this seems arguably upside down as a business model. The marginal cost of distributing a digital copy of a book, song, TV show, or movie is $0. A company with …
Continue reading "Upside down business models for the Kindle"
Amazon.com have a tremendous set of assets. They have millions of customer accounts. They have a ton of existing relationships with publishers and content providers. Behind the scenes they are one of the leading cloud computing service providers servicing start-ups and established firms alike (including Netflix). And they have a market leading product -- the …
Continue reading "Amazon's pricing play that leverages the cloud"
We don’t think of the Kindle Fire as a tablet. We think of it as a service. – Jeff Bezos The analysts predicted that Amazon would introduce its new Kindle Fire tablet today with an aggressive low price of $250 to $300, in line with low margin competitors like Samsung. They were wrong. Amazon priced …
Recently, the satirical newspaper The Onion captured — and not for the first time — just what I wanted to write about in this post with its article "'The Economist' to Halt Production for Month to Let Readers Catch Up." Still, though, I think the five-issue-high pile of The Economist on my desk could tell us much about what …
Continue reading "In digital media, the commercial value of the pile"
In 1974, hundreds of thousands of Australians with a bank account in good standing received a piece of plastic in the mail: a credit card, known as a Bankcard, launched and operated by a consortium of Australian banks. In one swoop, a payment instrument that had been previously available to only the wealthy in Australia (through …
Digitopoly 