Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Survival of paid service in the digitized world

If I am asked to select the top two theories of all the theories that I have learnt, I would select the theory of "survival of the fittest" and Maslow's “theory of hierarchy”, because one could easily analyze the behavior of humans and organization from the prism of these two theories.

Let us take the example of the survival of paid news service in the digital/print world. With the emergence of 24 hour news services on the net as well as on the television, the need to pay for this service is going down. I came across an article "Google Settles Book-Search Suits" on Wall Street Journal's website. This article was only for premium customers who subscribe to WSJ's online service. Big deal! I go to Google's news service and read the same news on a different website absolutely free of cost. One could give many more examples.

The dot com bubble 'exploded' in 2001-02 since a viable business case was not built around the internet. It has been 7 years and still a perfect internet business model has not emerged, though one could see the Googles and Amazons of the world succeeding. But, what is their core competence?

Friday, October 10, 2008

In search of a solution!

My fascination with the financial market continues……
The stock markets around the world have been touching new lows every other day; obviously the news channels are the net beneficiaries to keep ‘breaking’ some news or the other….and when there is absolutely nothing to ‘break’, then the natural choice – whether the ‘Fab 4’ of Indian cricket team should retire, should we provide legal aid to the terror suspects blah blah…
But, how do we solve this financial mess that we have got into, thanks to the ever increasing ‘greed’? Should we consult Alan Greespan? Comon, are we not blaming him for his policies? Should we make Bill Clinton the next prez? Comon, he is too busy ‘licking’ Hillary’s debacle wounds in the primaries. Then who can give us an answer? Mebbe God, but are we following “ceiling on desires”, which is the only long-term solution?
Hmmm, being confused and helpless, I turned on the TV and wow, I got an answer. Can you guess? Yea, I am sure our ‘captain’ Vijaykanth, who has eliminated so many terrorists, who can kill his enemies by catching and throwing back the bullets fired at him and who can do many such marvels; I guess he will have some solution to this problem. Only if George W Bush listened to him, instead of being too busy in doing nothing worthwhile. ;-) :-P