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)
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)
Note: 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)
