Competition in the Digital Age
A firm in a “pick and shovel” market produces a good or service that serves as an input to other businesses. A “frontier” pick-and-shovel supplier has made a significant technical breakthrough in applied science or engineering that has enabled capabilities in its product previously considered impractical, uneconomical, or impossible. Pick-and-shovel markets have been around for …
From a firm’s perspective, the emergence of a new technology wave is a new opportunity to generate a financial return. The question is precisely how. That topic remains as salient today, in the era of artificial intelligence, as it was when firms first encountered smartphones, the commercial internet, and personal computers. Before we fully embrace …
A prototype is a product or service's early sample, model, or release. It is built to test a concept or process and serves as a tangible representation of an idea. Some prototypes are primarily commercial, while others are scientific. The advent of digitization has significantly revolutionized the prototyping process over several decades in both commercial …
Human existence changed irreversibly after the invention of indoor plumbing and the municipal supply of water and sewage. The advent of electricity also changed life as we know it, and so did automobiles, the telephone, penicillin, pasteurization, the polio vaccine, and much more. In his book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth; The US …
In August 1995, Netscape held its initial public offering and caught the attention of every participant in computing and communications. It was a catalytic event for the commercial Internet, and it started the beginning of a long boom in investment by private firms, households, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists. With the 20th anniversary approaching, it’s time …
Behind every successful technology lie many quirky stories showing how it grew like a teenager or barely averted disaster. With the passage of time, most of those stories fade into obscurity or, at best, become parts of verbal explanations accompanying countless resumes. The few events that find their way into public discourse, if any do …
Moneyball is a huge hit, which doesn't happen too often to movies featuring an economics major who's good at statistics. It tells the true story of how the Oakland A's became a competitive team despite having a payroll less than 1/3 of the Yankees. They did it by using statistical techniques pioneered by sabermetrician Bill …
Digitopoly 