Status
Light blogging for the next few days - I'll be pretty busy.
Quick takes on stuff I've missed:
LiveJournal acq was expected, blogging will see winner-take-all dynamics across niches because of high switching costs - expect a duopoly or similar structure.
Keep up with the Long Tail discussions - they are very, very thought-provoking.
Tivo chooses the PC/net over cable - interesting, I've thought Tivo's got some great strategists behind it for a while now. Tivo's come a long way from the exposed position in a few months back - this is a nice move which buys it some more time.
Replication Wars - hype about drm/broadcast flag has been cycling up lately. Let's remember one simple fact:
every 'rights protection' technology so far (audio cassette tabs, floppy disk tabs, region encoding, etc) has been arbitraged away by the market in a matter of months. So historically, drm is
not something to worry about. The only real danger I think, is some kind of asinine scenario, where foundries are allowed to produce only drm-enabled chips.
billg calling free-culturites 'communists' - well, come on, let's call a spade a spade. What little economic analysis there is in the free culture world is convergent to basic Marxist thought (unsurprisingly). Now, this isn't a bad thing -in fact, redefining economics is probably the right prescription to build new business models and spark new innovation.
MS is the new AOLTW - they're planning to build walled gardens with agreements from folks like MTV. This is a bad move, but hey, what do you expect? MTV stopped innovating a long time ago, and it's a way for both to stave off total strategy decay.
Apple's new products - let's wait and see...