Information Rules
Metadata
- Author: Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian
- ASIN: B004OC07FI
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B004OC07FI
- Kindle link
Highlights
We use the term information very broadly. Essentially, anything that can be digitized—encoded as a stream of bits—is information. — location: 131
Information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce. — location: 140
Each version sells for a different price, allowing you to extract the maximum value of your product from the marketplace. — location: 156
Increzed on demand
perfectly — location: 164
Almost
out-of-control copying machine. — location: 165
Eluvio
When managing intellectual property, your goal should be to choose the terms and conditions that maximize the value of your intellectual property, not the terms and conditions that maximize the protection. — location: 172
The real value produced by an information provider comes in locating, filtering, and communicating what is useful to the consumer. — location: 202
The Net allows information vendors to move from the conventional broadcast form of advertising to one-to-one marketing. — location: 216
Content providers cannot operate without infrastructure suppliers, and vice versa. The information economy is about both information and the associated technology. — location: 256
Apple Computer pursued a very different strategy by producing a highly integrated product consisting of both a hardware platform and the software that ran on it. Their software and hardware was much more tightly integrated than the Microsoft/Intel offerings, so it performed better. (Microsoft recognized this early on and tried to license the Apple technology rather than investing in developing its own windowing system.) The downside was that the relative lack of competition (and, later, scale) made Apple products more expensive and, eventually, less powerful. In the long run, the “Wintel” strategy of strategic alliance was the better choice. — location: 280
PicturePhones, — location: 290
Having suppliers of complements aboard makes the overall system more attractive. And having competitors aboard can give today’s and tomorrow’s customers the assurance that they will not be exploited once they are locked in. — location: 378
First, this book is not about trends. Lots of books about the impact of technology are attempts to forecast the future. You’ve heard that work will become more decentralized, more organic, and more flexible. You’ve heard about flat organizations and unlimited bandwidth. But the methodology for forecasting these trends is unclear; typically, it is just extrapolation from recent developments. Our forecasting, such as it is, is based on durable economic principles that have been proven to work in practice. — location: 417
The Britannica example illustrates some of the classic problems of information pricing. One of the most fundamental features of information goods is that their cost of production is dominated by the “first-copy costs.” — location: 458
Interesting how wikipedia got round this with crowdsourcing
Information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce. Once the first copy of an information good has been produced, most costs are sunk and cannot be recovered. Multiple copies can be produced at roughly constant per-unit costs. There are no natural capacity limits for additional copies. — location: 495
The same good can be sold dozens of times. The most watched TV show in the world is Baywatch, which is available in 110 countries and has more than 1 billion viewers. In the United States, Baywatch isn’t even broadcast on national networks; it is available only via syndication. The shows are cheap to produce, have universal appeal, and are highly reusable. — location: 603
if convinced that you would lower prices aggressively to meet any new competition? One way to establish this reputation, painful though it may be in the short run, is to fight tooth and nail when faced — location: 657