information-rules-a-strategic-guide-to-the-network-economy
Strategic guide to competing in the network economy, covering lock-in, switching costs, standards wars, and information goods.
Kindle Highlights
Highlights
Information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce. — location: 140 ^ref-9776
Since people have widely different values for a particular piece of information, value-based pricing leads naturally to differential pricing. — location: 146 ^ref-14101
one way to differentiate versions of the same information good is to use delay. — location: 151 ^ref-19546
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 ^ref-32128
“a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” — location: 201 ^ref-21424
Infrastructure is to information as a bottle is to wine: the technology is the packaging that allows the information to be delivered to end consumers. — location: 232 ^ref-16630
The fact is, the Web isn’t all that impressive as an information resource. The static, publicly accessible HTML text on the Web is roughly equivalent in size to 1.5 million books. The — location: 237 ^ref-4926
The value of the Web lies in its capacity to provide immediate access to information. Using the Web, information suppliers can distribute up-to-date information dynamically from databases and other repositories. — location: 241 ^ref-62026
Lock-in arises whenever users invest in multiple complementary and durable assets specific to a particular information technology system. — location: 300 ^ref-40597
Technologies subject to strong network effects tend to exhibit long lead times followed by explosive growth. The pattern results from positive feedback: as the installed base of users grows, more and more users find adoption worthwhile. Eventually, the product achieves critical mass and takes over the market. — location: 325 ^ref-63549
Before 1982 almost no one had a fax machine; after 1987, the majority of businesses had one or more. — location: 330 ^ref-16710
growth is a strategic imperative, not just to achieve the usual production side economies of scale but to achieve the demand side economies of scale generated by network effects. — location: 338 ^ref-58650
The key challenge is to obtain critical mass—after that, the going gets easier. Once you have a large enough customer base, the market will build itself. However, having a superior technology is not enough to win. You may need to employ marketing tools such as penetration pricing to ignite the positive feedback. — location: 341 ^ref-38630
In competing to become the standard, or at least to achieve critical mass, consumer expectations are critical. In a very real sense, the product that is expected to become the standard will become the standard. — location: 347 ^ref-1771
Another method for achieving critical mass is to assemble a powerful group of strategic partners. — location: 374 ^ref-27279
The toothpaste vendor may pay a dollar or two per consumer in production, packaging, and distribution to promote its product; but the information vendor pays essentially nothing to distribute an additional free copy. For information goods, copies are free for the producer as well as for the consumer; — location: 483 ^ref-22122
there are only two sustainable structures for an information market. The dominant firm model may or may not produce the “best” product, but by virtue of its size and scale economies it enjoys a cost advantage over its smaller rivals. Microsoft is everyone’s favorite example, since it controls the market for operating systems for desktop computers. In a differentiated product market we have a number of firms producing the same “kind” of information, but with many different varieties. This is the most common market structure for information goods: the publishing, film, television, and some software markets fit this model. — location: 536 ^ref-12528
The company avoids the trap of having its prime product commoditized by organizing it in ways that are useful to customers, thereby differentiating its product from the competition. — location: 618 ^ref-46435
The best way to secure such a leadership position is through an early presence in the market, combined with a forward-looking approach to pricing. — location: 634 ^ref-41230
Page created automatically from Kindle notes sync