MANAGEMENT & STRATEGY; TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY MANAGEMENT
Elinor and H. Wendell Hobbs Professor of Management and Strategy
Shane Greenstein is the Elinor and Wendell Hobbs Professor of Management and Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He studies the business economics of computing, communications and Internet infrastructure. His research and writing focus on a variety of topics in this area, including the adoption of client-server systems, the growth of commercial Internet access networks, the industrial economics of platforms, and changes in communications policy. He has written and edited five books, and published over ninety refereed journal articles, book chapters, monographs and invited reports. He has written over seventy articles for policy and business audiences. He is regularly quoted in national and local media. He has been a regular columnist and essayist for IEEE Micro since 1995, where he comments on the economics of microelectronics.
Greenstein is North American Editor for Information Economics and Policy, and Associate Editor for Economics Bulletin. He also reviews for a wide assortment of major journals in economics and information science, and for a wide assortment of organizations. He was chair of the Management and Strategy Department from 2002 to 2005.
Computers
Econometrics
Industrial Economics
Technology
Telecom
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New York Times: Are the Glory Days Long Gone for I.T.? - 8/9/2009
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NPR: Stimulus Stirs Debate Over Rural Broadband Access - 2/16/2009
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We examine the relationship between changes in price levels and the evolution of the market for dial-up ISPs in the United States from November 1993 to January 1999. This was a period of much entry and exit and new product introduction. We show that new firms enter the market at a small but significant price discount to established incumbents. At the same time, introduction of new products/technologies is priced at a significant price premium to the existing offerings, but the premium declines rapidly. We also find a survivor bias in pricing: ISPs who survive tend to have higher prices than younger firms. This bias interacts with the evolution of the market. Lastly, we find comparatively little role for exit.
Did Bill Gates acquire most of his wealth by fair means or foul? Last issue's column examined the 1980s and early 1990s and largely saw fair actions. A few fell on the border. Today we ask about the mid-1990s and beyond. What a period this was for Gates. The diffusion of the Internet required a redirection of numerous Microsoft activities. Gates had the skills to lead such an organizational renewal, and he did. Those actions were impressive. The Internet also raised numerous challenges to Microsoft's market dominance. In protecting that dominance, Gates was accused of committing many fouls. These also were impressive, albeit in an infamous way. The details make for a rich story behind a wealthy man.
In June of 2008, William Gates Jr. will step down as chief software architect at Microsoft. Greenstein measures Gates' career against the yardstick applied to history's great robber barons, examining the difference between fair and foul. Which mattered most in Bill Gates' career, and why?
In September 2001, approximately 45 million U.S. households accessed the Internet through a dial-up connection, while 10 million used a broadband connection. In March 2006, a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found a sharply contrasting picture: Approximately 42% (and growing) had broadband, while dial-up use was dropping rapidly.
The consumer price index says that the official price index for Internet access in the US went mildly down and up during the five years of dot-com boom and bust. It declined fiver percent over the next three years, between December 2002 and December 2005. Then just recently, it declined more than 18 percent from its base. What does the big drop mean? And how does the rise of broadband access, and the fall of dial-up, figure in?
It is essential to get the proportionate units right in economic measurement. The present analysis of dial-up and broadband markets, however, contains a problem with its units. A one-dollar decline from $20 in dial-up prices is treated as equivalent to a two-dollar decline from $40 in broadband prices. This assessment undervalues broadband revenues, because it doesn't factor in the greater satisfaction per dollar experienced by converts from dial-up to broadband. In this column, Greenstein seeks to correct the units of comparison.
Innovation within Internet access markets can be usefully understood through the lens of economic experiments. Economic experiments yield lessons to market participants through market experience. The essay distinguishes between directed and undirected economic experiments. It discusses how spreading of lessons transforms a market. As a lesson becomes common it becomes a part of industry know–how. Further innovations build on that know how, renewing a cycle of experimentation.
Thomas Watson Sr., the first charismatic CEO of IBM, encouraged social conformity in his firm because he thought it made his sales force more effective. This column uses Watsonpsilas framing to examine modern arrangements outside of large firms. As it turns out, innovation happens at the edges of marketwide structures and at the edges of conventional society.
What is the economic value created by the increasing use of broadband? There are two alternative economic concepts for understanding the value created by a new good, one pertaining to gross domestic product (GDP) and another pertaining to users. Greenstein combines the two concepts to estimate the overall economic value created by broadband. He estimates that broadband created at least an additional 15 billion dollars of economic value in 2006, but less than half of that shows up in GDP.
Some general business questions require information about idiosyncratic circumstances. In these cases, a firm must actually offer a service of product and observe what different customers will pay for. Call this a market experiment aimed at learning lessons. What happens as lessons spread to firms outside the one conducting the experiment? Commodifying and accumulating lessons must go hand in hand.
This study analyzes the geographic spread of commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the leading suppliers of Internet access. The geographic spread of ISPs is a key consideration in US policy for universal access. We examine the Fall of 1998, a time of minimal government subsidy, when inexpensive access was synonymous with a local telephone call to an ISP. Population size and location in a metropolitan statistical area were the single most important determinants of entry, but their effects on national, regional and local firms differed, especially on the margin. The thresholds for entry were remarkably low for local firms. Universal service in less densely-populated areas was largely a function of investment decisions by ISPs with local focus. There was little trace of the early imprint of government subsidies for Internet access at major US universities.
56K modems were introduced under two competing incompatible standards. We show the importance of competition between internet service providers in the adoption process. We show that ISPs were less likely to adopt the technology that more competitors adopted. This result is particularly striking given that industry participants expected coordination on one standard or the other. We speculate about the role of ISP differentiation in preventing the market from achieving standardization until a standard setting organization intervened.
The theme of this group of papers is how the extraordinary technological changes in communications will affect market structure and competition; and the consequent needs for regulation or other government intervention. Few words are needed to introduce a subject of such evident interest to IEP readers, or to introduce such prominent authors of the three papers we include in this series. Martin Cave (University of Warwick), Luigi Prosperetti (University of Milan), and Chris Doyle (University of Warwick) write on the development of wireless and wire-based networks in Europe, and how they are likely to affect telecommunications industry competition and the need for European Union regulatory reform. The contribution by Gerald Faulhaber (University of Pennsylvania) is about how the transition to wireless systems is forcing a choice between alternative spectrum allocation regimes, with a primary focus on US policy. Eli Noam (Columbia University) writes about boom-bust cycles in telecommunications, how concentration levels in these industries are likely to evolve, and the policy options that are entailed. Submissions to the forum were invited, based on the authors’ previous contributions to the field. We are grateful for exemplary service by anonymous referees of each of the papers.
Can the passage of a federal law help entrepreneurs? Columnist Shane Greenstein is a skeptic.
We examine the role of differentiation among Competitive Local Exchange Carriers’ (CLECs) in nearly 1,200 U.S. cities in 1999 and 2002, before and after a valuation crash affecting communications firms. We test and reject the null hypothesis of homogeneous competitors. We also find strong evidence that differentiated CLECs account for both potential market demand and the business strategies of competitors when making their entry decisions. Finally, product heterogeneity in markets in 1999 helps predict how the structure of markets evolved through 2002. We conclude that the policy debate for local telecommunications regulation should account for differentiated behavior.
This study examines the sources of geographic variance in commercial Internet use. Until now, two opposing views have been argued on the relationship between Internet technology and economic agglomeration. One view, which we term global village theory, asserts that Internet technology helps lower communication costs and break down geographic boundaries between firms. The other view, labeled urban density theory, argues that the Internet follows a traditional pattern of diffusion – diffusing first through urban areas with complementary technical and knowledge resources that lower the costs of investing in new frontier technology. We provide a third view, industry composition theory, that asserts that demand for the Internet is increasing in location size because of the concentration of information-intensive firms in urban areas. We offer hard evidence on factors influencing the dispersion of Internet technology to businesses. We find no evidence for urban density theory in the diffusion of basic access and participation in the Internet network. We do find some evidence supporting global village theory for diffusion along this dimension. We also find that the pattern of adoption of frontier Internet technologies supports urban density theory not global village theory. Last, we show that business use of the Internet is significantly shaped by the prior geographic distribution of industry.
Two opposing views have been argued on the relationship between Internet technology and economic agglomeration. One view, which we term global village theory, asserts that Internet technology helps lower communication costs and break down geographic boundaries between firms. The other view, labeled urban density theory, argues that the Internet follows a traditional pattern of diffusion-diffusing first through urban areas with complementary technical and knowledge resources that lower the costs of investing in new frontier technology. In this paper, we offer hard evidence on factors influencing the dispersion of Internet technology to businesses. On the one hand, we find no evidence for urban density theory in the diffusion of basic access and participation in the Internet network. We do find some evidence supporting global village theory for diffusion along this dimension. On the other hand, we find that the pattern of adoption of frontier Internet technologies supports urban density theory. Our results reject the concept of an urban-rural digital divide in participation in the Internet network. Even for frontier technologies, the pre-existing distribution of industries determines most of the differences between locations. Consequently, policy aimed at increasing adoption in laggard areas may be misguided.
This article proposes a statistical test for determining whether agents in discrete locations are more agglomerated or disperse than predicted by independent random choice.
We examine the location of private schools in California. We estimate why schools choose one location over another. We find that these choices are sensitive to the quality of local public schools and the demographic composition of the location schooling population.
Do commercial firms provide ubiquitous geographic coverage of internet access? We examine the provision dial-up phone numbers provided by Internet Service Providers in 1998 in the United State. We show that nearly 92% of the US population had access to a competitive market for Internet Service. No more than 2% had little or no access.
What activity do firms pursue to fill gaps between the technological frontier and the state of user technologies? As a window on this question this paper examines the activities of Internet Service Providers during the early development of the commercial internet market.
Why do firms upgrade their capital equipment to reach frontier capabilities? We examine the upgrade behavior of ISPs, specifically their propensity to use ISDN and 56K modems.
This study analyzes the service offerings of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the commercial suppliers of Internet access in the United States. It presents data on the services of 2089 ISPs in the summer of 1998. By this time many ISPs had begun to offer services other than basic access. This paper develops an Internet access industry product code which classifies these services. Significant heterogeneity across ISPs is found in the propensity to offer these services, a pattern with an unconditional urban/rural difference. Most of the explained variance in behavior arises from firm-specific factors, with some evidence of location-specific factors.
Cases like Microsoft's federal antitrust fight come along once a decade. However, the national press has reported the results, interviewed a few experts, and already moved on. It's as if nothing happened on a grander scale.
This paper examines the mainframe computer market from 1985-1991 and attempts to identify the types of buyers that demand particular computer features, such as speed and memory. To identify these buyers, demand for computer characteristics is estimated using a demand model based on Rosen (1974). Through these demand estimates we are able to show that the advent of on-line transactions processing was pushing the demand for computer speed and memory to some extent. However, beyond this specialized application, only a few industries seemed to be demanding the newest technology, while the majority of buyers continued to buy small mainframes throughout the sample period.
The study interprets the geographic diffusion of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and the expansion of ISPs’ product lines in terms of the market for technological mediation. A firm involved in technology mediation takes advantage of gaps between general technological opportunities and particular user needs in specific places at particular times. If the economic opportunities are fleeting, then so too is the business. If the economic opportunities are renewed frequently, then the business can grow and adapt to take advantage of them. The concept of technological mediation helps us understand business behavior accompanying the commercialization of internet access technology.
In this paper we examine the development of the microcomputer market in the early 1980s. CP/M, a widely-adopted operating system, was orphaned by the user and the development communities. A new operating system, DOS, and a new hardware platform, the IBM PC, became the predominant industry standard. We examine the statistical relationship between data that reflects hardware and software sales for the competing platforms. We conclude that the economic processes underlying the development of DOS differed from those underlying CP/M and that many of these differences related to the role of software development.
The authors examine thirty years of computer industry market structure. Their analysis explains the persistence of dominant computer firms, their recent decline, and the changing success of competitive entry. It emphasizes the importance of technological competition between computer 'platforms,' not firms. This aspect of competition has changed little over time. Two things did change. Young platforms serving newly founded segments eventually challenged established platforms across segment boundaries through a process of indirect entry. Vertically disintegrated platforms have led to divided technical leadership in important segments. The result is an industry with far more technological competition.
In this short article, I outline a few key concepts to help understand long run economic forces for structural change and stasis in the platforms that govern behavior in the computer industry. While the primary goal for most of this discussion is to explain why things happen instead of what firms should do, I will conclude with a comparison of some standard strategic issues against the historical patterns of change in the industry.
We reassess Arrow's (1962) [Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention, in NBER, The Rate and Direction of Innovative Activity (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ)] results concerning the effect of market structure on the returns from process innovation. Here we consider product innovations that are vertically differentiated from older products, in the sense of Shaked and Sutton (1982) (Relaxing Price Competition through Product Differentiation, Review of Economic Studies 49, 3-13.), Shaked and Sutton (1983) (Natural Oligopolies, Econometrica 51, 1469-1484.). Competition and monopoly in the old product market provide identical returns to innovation when (i) the monopolist is protected from new product entry, and (ii) innovation is non-drastic, in the sense that the monopolist supplies positive quantities of both old and new products. If the monopolist can be threatened with entry, monopoly provides strictly greater incentives. Welfare may be greater under monopoly when innovation is valuable.
In this essay, we analyse the diffusion of the Internet and online retailing within the standard framework of diffusion to heterogeneous consumers. We show that many conditions favour the diffusion of Internet retailing in the short run, but not in the long run. We argue that the standard framework needs to account for the "nested" diffusion process. That is, the diffusion of online retailing depends on the diffusion of many other goods, whose underlying diffusion process is also changing. An understanding of these interrelated processes leads to a richer understanding of the prospects for the long-term diffusion of online retailing.
We investigate product life cycles in the commercial mainframe computer market. We use hazard models with time-varying covariates to estimate the probability of product exit and Poisson models to estimate the probability of introduction. We measure the importance of different aspects of market structure, such as the degree of competitiveness, cannibalization, vintage, product niche, and firm effects. We find evidence of a relationship between the determinants of product exit and product entry.
This paper closely studies the historical experiences of computer users faced with incompatibility problems. One key point throughout the discussion is that operating system compatibilities and application software were the principal source of switching costs. The larger point here is that vendor specificity is partially a choice-variable for the buyer. It influences many facets of an organization, as well as management and employee behavior. Foresighted users anticipate that daily decisions regarding programming practices and equipment maintenance influence the costs of switching during a later vendor decision. Buyers take a wide variety of actions, both simple and complex. Most of the paper is concerned with documenting and analyzing how buyers change investments, collect information, manipulate bidding procedures and change managements practices--either in anticipation of, or in response to, incompatibility problems.
This research examines the location choice of California private schools in 1978-1979. We make use of some of the recent developments in the analysis of count data. The results indicate that the character of the population and the public schools influence location decisions. Private schools with different religious affiliations respond differently to population characteristics, which we argue is evidence of differences in the objectives of these different types of private schools. Location decisions of all types of private schools depend most on characteristics of the community in which a school locates, with attributes of surrounding communities having small effects on the location decision.
No careful empirical research has tested the widely held belief that the cost of switching computer vendors tends to produce technological “lock-in,” meaning that the cost of switching between incompatible vendors is prohibitively expensive. Using several studies by federal agencies into the costs of switching mainframe computer vendors, this article concludes that mainframe computers of the late 1970s possessed many of the features typically associated with lock-in. However, many other factors also attenuated tendencies to lock-in. While lock-in was important for the outcomes of several well-documented instances, it is not clear whether lock-in was important for the outcomes of a wide set of cases.
Until the beginnings of the Collor presidency in 1990, the Brazilian government strongly protected domestic producers of electronics goods. Using hedonic methods we analyze systematic evidence of the performance of the Brazilian microcomputer industry and compare it with international standards. Our analysis highlights rapid rates of advance in Brazil but lower rates than potential international competition. Technical frontiers typically lagged price/performance practices in international markets by at least three years and by as much as five. Foregone buyer surplus due to protection had to be quite high, approaching 20% of domestic expenditure on microcomputers.
This study focuses on the impact of telecommunication infrastructure on economic activity in two sectors: flare, insurance and real estate; and manufacturing. Results indicate that modernization of the telephone network is associated with more fire, insurance and real estate activity in the local region, while it is not associated with more manufacturing. Once other determinants of growth are controlled for, a doubling of optic fiber cable leads to at least a 10%, and possibly a much higher, increase in the level of economic activity in fire, insurance and real estate. This result implies that the level of modernization of a telecommunications network has an economically important influence on the amount of high tech white collar activity in a region, while it is less important for manufacturing activity, which typically employs less modern telecommunications services.
Why do government agencies sole-source sometimes and use competitive procedures for procurement other times? This paper develops a testable model of the economic determinants of agencies' procurement procedures and applies it to procurement of general purpose mainframe computer systems. Factors related to the extent of vendor competition or the value of a procurement importantly influences an agency's procedural choice. Extensive experience between an agency buyer and an incumbent vendor, or the buyer's experience with IBM, also helps predict the agency's procedural choice.
This research examines the relative strength and significance of the status of "incumbent contractor" in federal computer procurement. One finding, as expected, is that an agency is likely to acquire a system from an incumbent vendor. Another finding, perhaps more interesting, is that the (in) compatibility between a buyer's installed base and a potential system also influences the vendor choice; a result that may be the first econometric measurement of the competitive effects of incompatibility. An illustration of this thesis comes from IBM's experience. New evidence shows, however, that IBM's apparent disadvantage with government agencies is largely due to incompatibilities in IBM's product line.
The author presents a synthesis of thinking within the economics field about network development and standardization. The analysis focuses on understanding economic factors shaping important contemporary events and the development of standards in tomorrow's information infrastructure. The motivation for such a synthesis is that many observations about market mechanisms are not consistent with one another, nor do they all transparently synthesize into a single policy vision. The key to understanding this confusion is that standards take on a dual role, as a coordinator and as a constraint. These insights should be useful for the development of appropriate public policy and management strategy.
This article provides an outline of the economic factors influencing the development of standards. Standards may develop through market mechanisms, organizations that combine market participants and government guidance. Each of these mechanisms may produce desirable outcomes or distort them, depending on market structure, chance historical events, and the costs of technical alternatives. Many economically desirable and distorted outcomes are possible in theory, while in practice, it is often difficult to know what is a good or bad economic choice.
The paper deals with the micro-economics of interface manipulation, i.e. the design of the interface between two products to enhance the profits accruing to the firm controlling the design. Taking several alleged instances of 'physical tie-ins' as a reference point, it argues that economist's usual treatment of 'tie-ins' and bundling is inappropriate for these cases, and it proposes an alternative model. The model identifies the circumstances under which interface manipulation will yield competitive advantages to an integrated system designer. It also focuses on the limits placed on such behavior by the demand for 'backward compatible' components. The model's implications are then examined for the light they shed on arguments about the plausibility of 'leveraging'-i.e. the use of monopoly power in one component market to gain monopoly power in a complementary component market. The paper concludes that the notion of leveraging can be given analytical substance, but emphasizes that the concept should be used with some care.
This paper surveys the contributions that economists have made to understanding standards-setting processes and their consequences for industry structure and economic welfare. Standardization processes of four kinds are examined, namely: (1) market competition involving products embodying unsponsored standards, (2) market competition among sponsored (proprietary) standards, (3) agreements within voluntary standards-writing organizations, a18d (4) direct governmental promulgation. The major trajectories along which research has been moving are described and related to both the positive and the normative issues concerning compatibility standards that remain to be studied.
We study the determinants of market pricing for vendors providing hosting and related services We propose a novel typology linking firm features and firm behavior to pricing. We test between two views about the creation of value in technology commodity markets, one affiliated with mobility of assets from old to new, and the other affiliated with business acumen and efficiency. We labeled these as origins and strategic behavior, respectively. Our analysis finds that both of these factors contribute to the variance of prices between contracts. However, the variance in prices between firms with different origins is much smaller than the variance in prices for firms pursuing different strategies. Overall, our findings stress that this market is far from homogeneous, because firms find a myriad of ways to differentiate themselves.
This study examines the pricing behavior of e-business service providers. We focus on understanding the sources of market value in this young market. What explains the wide variance in prices we observe for services? What fraction of price is attributable to costs and what fraction to markup? We are especially interested in understanding how an ostensible commodity commands value. What factors correlated with successfully charging a high mark-up over cost? Our approach follows in the spirit of a long tradition in applied industrial economics. We employ econometric methods for the estimation of price cost margins. This has been a central topic in settings such as this, where complete data are not available to calibrate rich models of pricing behavior. However, we cannot directly use an existing model in the literature. Instead, we employ a new method that examines the portfolio of contracts from each firm and imposes profit maximization on the relationship of one price to another.
Until now, two opposing views have been argued on the relationship between Internet technology and economic agglomeration. One view, which we term global village theory, asserts that Internet technology helps lower communication costs and break down geographic boundaries between firms. The other view, labeled urban density theory, argues that the Internet follows a traditional pattern of diffusion-diffusing first through urban areas with complementary technical and knowledge resources that lower the costs of investing in new frontier technology. We offer hard evidence on factors influencing the dispersion of Internet technology to businesses. We find no evidence for urban density theory in the diffusion of basic access and participation in the Internet network. We do find some evidence supporting global village theory for diffusion along this dimension. We also find that the pattern of adoption of frontier Internet technologies supports urban density theory not global village theory.
Our study provides an industrial census of the dispersion of Internet technology to commercial establishments in the United States. We distinguish between participation, that is, use of the Internet because it is necessary for all business (e.g. email and browsing) and enhancement, that is, adoption of Internet technology to enhance computing processes for competitive advantage (e.g. electronic commerce). We find that participation and enhancement display contrasting patterns of dispersion. In a majority of industries, participation has approached saturation levels, while enhancement occurs at lower rates with dispersion reflecting long standing industrial differences in use of computing. In general, lead adopters were drawn from a variety of industries, including many of the same industries that lead adoption of other generations of information technologies; however, the appearance of water transportation and warehousing as leading industries in Internet adoption shows that the Internet influenced establishments where logistical processes played a key role. We find large differences across industries and we caution against inferring too much from the experience in manufacturing despite the widespread availability of data in that sector.
Why did the commercialization of the Internet proceed so quickly and with such success? The performance of the commerical Internet in the mid to late 90s is particularly puzzling in light of the large number of examples of government technology that did not commercialize easily. This paper examines the Internet Service Provider industry as a window on why the commercial markets sometimes do or do not help a new technology diffuse. The paper draws lessons for other technologies commercialized by government.
Why did commercialization of the Internet go so well? This paper examines events in the Internet access market as a window on this broad question. The study emphasizes four themes. First, commercializing Internet access did not give rise to many of the anticipated technical and operational challenges. Entrepreneurs quickly learned that the Internet access business was commercially feasible. Second, Internet access was malleable as a technology and as an economic unit. Third, privatization fostered attempts to adapt the technology in new uses, new locations, new market settings, new applications and in conjunction with other lines of business. These went beyond what anyone would have forecast by examining the uses for the technology prior to 1992. Fourth, and not trivially, the NSF was lucky in one specific sense. The Internet access industry commercialized at a propitious moment, at the same time as the growth of an enormous new technological opportunity, the World Wide Web. As it turned out, the web thrived under market oriented, decentralized, and independent decision making. The paper draws lessons for policies governing the commercialization of other government managed technologies and for the Internet access market moving forward.
This testimony begins with the classic investigation of Arrow (1962) and shows the stengths and limitations of viewing innovative behavior through this lens. It then reviews recent thinking about innovation incentives in light of firm choices to cooperate or compete with other providers of intermediate goods in technically intensive markets.
In 1997, within a program funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to study the economics of information, CLIR supported a project on the geographic spread of the commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) market. Professor Shane Greenstein of the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, conducted the study. This Research Brief, drawn from Professor Greenstein?s report on the project, describes some of the principal findings.
Encyclopedia Britannica was the leading provider of encyclopedias in the English language, but after sales declined rapidly in the early 1990s the company was forced to file for bankruptcy. Many different organizational and market factors contributed to this crisis, such as the diffusion of the PC, the invention of Encarta, the technical challenges of moving text to electronic formats, and the difficulties of inventing a new format while also operating the leading seller of books. Looking back, what could the company have done differently? The case illustrates important themes in the literature on a leading firm’s response to technical opportunities and threats. The case teaches students about technological waves, technological disruption, and different concepts of obsolescence. It illustrates strategic concepts, such as attacker’s advantages and skunk works.
In 2009 Wikia was the Internet’s largest for-profit provider of hosted open-source wikis, with over a million daily users. After five years of existence, the organization had supported a wide range of exploratory activities, experiencing both success and failure. With approximately $3 million of cash on hand, Wikia turned cash flow positive in 2009, with revenues of approximately $4.5 million, affording it time and flexibility to try new things. Some of the company’s employees and investors suggested that Wikia should attempt to expand and market itself more aggressively, but which strategic direction should receive priority? The case presents many of the issues and tradeoffs facing CEO Gil Penchina as he formulates these priorities.
By 2006 Wikipedia had achieved the type of success that only a handful of young organizations could ever dream of reaching. It had grown from almost nothing in 2001 to become one the consistently highest ranked and most visited sites on the Internet. This success brought new problems and at a scale that no organization of this type had ever before faced. The case exposes students to Wikipedia’s brief history, the causes of its success, and the issues it faced going forward. Two topics form the focus of the case. The first concerns the rules and norms for submission and editing, which raise questions about the ambiguity of Wikipedia’s authority and the virtual cycle that keeps the site going. The second lesson concerns the need to alter its practices as it gains in popularity, raising questions about what any wiki site, profit-oriented or open source, must do to scale to large numbers of participants and entries. These issues arise as part of a discussion about the site’s priorities going forward.
This course has three goals: to develop steps for applying econometric theory to real problems, to educate students about business databases and to give students an opportunity to read important empirical papers on business strategy.
This course counts toward the following majors: Biotechnology, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Health Enterprise Management, Health Industry Management, Management & Strategy, Technology Industry Management.
This course develops approaches to analyzing strategies within technology markets. It teaches students how to analyze commercial forces in hyper-competitive markets, where firm structure, product cycles and competitive environment change rapidly. The course asks students to develop strategies that align with these structural market forces. These issues are illustrated through general readings and with cases from computing, electronics, online, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals markets. The course strikes a balance between presenting a few general models of market behavior and presenting a few key episodes of market behavior. It is aimed at three types of students: those who anticipate taking management positions in technology-intensive firms where they must formulate strategy, those who anticipate investing in technology markets and must analyze firm strategy, and those who anticipate contracting with firms that do much of their business in these types of markets.
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