[This post was first published at HBR.org on 10th July 2015]. Why aren’t things better? This is something that I often feel these days when searching for information on the internet. And it is especially something I feel when I am searching for products where quality matters. This applies to restaurants, tradespeople, and books, for …
Sharing user search data
Last week I presented at the Lear Antitrust 2.0 conference in Rome. While there was no specific agenda beyond thinking about search and advertising, much of the discussion centred around Google's travails as EU Competition Authorities investigate its Google Shopping results (yes, really) and its dominance in Android. It was clear from the presentations by …
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 …
Google and platforms
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 …
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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Should Google go back to Only Organic?
If you have a couple hours to burn on some political theater, go and watch the Senate hearings about Google. Here is a link. Actually, as someone who foresaw the inevitability of this event, I was rather disappointed. This hearing was pretty anti-climactic. To have found this interesting you had to be a serious junkie …
The Present and Future of Digital Publishing
Here is what we know about publishing. It is going digital, and that means traditional publishers have to switch their complementors — the term we use to describe firms that do essential things but are not strictly suppliers. Traditional publishers' complementors were printers and distributors. Their new complementors will be whoever can get their digital editions to …
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The Consequences of Hiybbprqag’ing
Like so many who watch developments in the tech world, I have been absorbed in the last few days on the ‘Bing Sting’ and precisely what it means. The debate is quite passionate. Following the initial story from SearchEngineLand by Danny Sullivan that documented Google’s identification of how Bing’s search rankings were related to its own, Microsoft responded but …
Digitopoly 