Replication Wars - New Strategies

A new piece of hardware in Japan links directly to online music stores without a PC, via ethernet.

This has been my view of the outcome of the Replication Wars for quite a while - give away a bulletproof delivery mechanism, and then sell the media. Like the razor and the blades. This is platform strategy - tying the value of a complementary good to a larger platform, whose value can't be extracted, because it's not subject to replication.

What's the most famous example? Obviously, Microsoft and Intel - Microsoft makes software, that should have been massively replicated. How did they win their own Replication War? They tied the sale of Windows to Intel's processors, beating the replicators at their own game by parasitizing Intel's value.

I was writing a longer piece on why such hardware would be sound strategy, but these guys beat me to it! I'll post the piece soon anyways.