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« WSJ: How Videogames Are Changing the Economy | Main | My new book "Eat People" is out this week »

January 31, 2011

Comments

Mark Sigal

One small fly in the ointment to your thesis, Andy, is Apple. Apple is unquestionably vertically oriented, and they represent arguably the most profitable company out there, which is a by-product of focused execution, deep integration and perfected workflows.

On almost any measure, they stand alone, in terms of overall sales, margins, diversity of product lines (from a revenue perspective), success of R&D in creating new hit products and cash flow generation.

One argument is that Google made the CEO change for the simple reason that their horizontal, loosely-coupled integration has failed to create new hit products (from a % of revenue perspective).

The counter is that perhaps Apple is consuming too much of the overall dollars in the mobile, media and computing ecosystem, and thus will, collapse upon itself once an alternative proves itself better at increasing the "wealth" of the participants - arguably, the core reason Microsoft won the PC wars.

What's your take?

Cheers.

Mark

skyskinearth

Always enjoying your insightful posts and books, but wondering how the banking system and its close ties to government(s) fits into the new flat ecosystem? Will it - over time - naturally get whittled down to a few bare functional niches? Banking shenanigans in Egypt make it seem (again, as in US and Europe) more like a government-enabled wealth sucking apparatus, than a wealth creating one. Would value your perspective greatly!

Bob Allard

Terrific framing of a bunch of difficult concepts (geopolitics/macroeconomics/history of technology and war, among others). The key drivers - freedom of capital, ideas and labor enabled (largely) by western (ie. Free) institutions - the military, banking systems, higher education and technology (both infrastructure and tech-enabled systems like Skype, Twitter, YouTube/Google, etc) are all intertwined, and the expectations of the world's people rich and poor are equalizing rapidly.

It's really hard to lower people's expectations once they've gone up. People will do crazy things (like lighting themselves on fire) to fight against that sort of oppression, and that tends to awaken people to their own feeling of righteous injustice.

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They are not going to do a lot with that status, as I only see USA weaken it's economical position through unnecessary warfare.

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It's really hard to lower people's expectations once they've gone up. People will do crazy things (like lighting themselves on fire) to fight against that sort of oppression, and that tends to awaken people to their own feeling of righteous injustice.

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I personal when expect for some thing I become crazy for that. This is true!

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