It has been a week and the Apple Car rumour hasn’t been denied by Apple. (Here’s the background in case you have been living under a rock). So what are we to make of all this? Much of what has been talked about is complete speculation. That it will be electric, autonomous, a mini-van (!) …
Password Security and Game Theory
Over the last few days or so, I have done much fretting about this article in The Atlantic by James Fallows. The story of how Fallows' wife had her Gmail account hacked by someone who used it to try and extort money out of her friends and contacts and, to add insult to injury, deleted …
Jobs: A Vision of American Entrepreneurship
[This is a guest post by Tim Bresnahan, the Landau Professor in Technology and the Economy at Stanford University; Ed.] Steve Jobs has died. We should remember his accomplishments and the vision of American entrepreneurship he embodied. The PC business was founded by a ragtag band of outsiders. Steve, a lotus-eating less-than-successful Atari employee, was …
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The Representative Agent in the Technological World
I live in a world of economics where we tend to doubt the power of the individual. To be sure, there are individuals who are in positions of power and who can inflict damage on the world. But in the world of business, these tend to wash out. Leaders may come and go but very …
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Dampening iPhone upgrade expectations
Product life cycles are a tricky business. Car models often have a five year lifespan. Computers have a couple of years. But somewhere along the way, the world decided that iPhones should have a yearly cycle. Today, Apple announced the iPhone 4S. It's an upgraded iPhone 4 and labelled as such. During the announcement Apple's …
Amazon's pricing play that leverages the cloud
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 …
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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 …
Apple's 'Buy Your Way Out of Piracy' Office
At the WWDC Apple announced its iCloud suite of apps. One of them was ‘iTunes in the Cloud.’ This was a free service that allowed consumers who had purchased music through iTunes to download that music and sync in across multiple devices (including the iPhone, iPad and both Macs and PCs). This provided ease of …
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How not to rip off your customers
The title of this post surely seems somewhat strange. Surely any self-respecting business should be in the interest of making as much profit as possible, and the temptation might be to extract as much as you can from each customer interaction. But we know that such views can be too short-term. In many situations, while …
Antitrust and Apple's iPad Subscription Pricing
Consider the following situation. You are a producer of a certain fashion item (maybe, designer jeans). A clothing retailer opens up a store on the highly trafficked, High Street. They would like to stock your jeans but they insist on a low wholesale price even though they will price at full retail to consumers. You …
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Digitopoly 