November 10, 2010

Will Disaggregation and Outsourcing Destroy the “Apprenticeship” Model?

Lawyers, consultants, and investment bankers follow a fairly similar career path: excessive hours and tedious work at the start of their careers, followed by vastly better compensation and marginally better hours later on.

This makes a certain amount of sense: the fastest way to get a decade of experience is do work double-time for five years.

The system works for people who are already in the industry: they get their grunt-work done. It works for people who are joining the industry: they learn everything they need to know, and the difficulty of the work allows the industry to keep an “up or out” structure along with a steady path for advancement.
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November 8, 2010

The Iron Law of Online Marketing: Why Your Ads (Almost Always) Can’t Be Your Competitive Advantage

There is only one interesting way to make money, in any field: develop and exploit a durable competitive advantage.1 Berkshire Hathaway wins because they are the buyer of first resort for good businesses that want to sell, and they can get cheap capital through superior underwriting; Facebook wins because to achieve parity with them, you have to recreate a 500 million-node social graph; the corner bodega turns a profit because that particular corner has a bodega and a half’s worth of foot traffic. In every one of these cases, it’s theoretically possible to compete with the incumbent, but there’s a better ROI in just letting them dominate the industry.

One thing these companies have in common is that their competitive advantage applies to the product or the process—either they can make the same thing for less money, or they can make something nobody else can make. What they don’t rely on is superior advertising. With good reason:

In the long term, the best advertising—the best creative, the best placement—will be sold to the high bidder. And the high bidder is whoever’s competitive advantage lets them earn more from a given customer. Read the rest of this entry »

September 7, 2010

A Challenge for Net Neutrality Supporters

The great thing about most critiques of Laissez-Faire economics is that they make great business plans. If “the market” can’t provide something, but that something is in demand, it’s a great opportunity!

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July 26, 2010

DuckDuckGo and Quora: Two Companies That Could Wreck Google Search

Online businesses compete by being the default. You want to connect with friends, so you default to Facebook; you want to waste five minutes, you default to Zynga; you want to talk about stocks, you default to Stocktwits.

Google is the Big Default. If you want to find something, but you’re not precisely sure what, Google is where you start. For about eight years, that’s where I’ve started, too. But recently, two sites have started to replace Google. And what’s especially dangerous about them is that they’re both encroaching on Google, starting at opposite ends of the spectrum of services that Google Search provides.

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