UsableMarkets

markets, design, usability, research

UsableMarkets header image 4

Entries Tagged as 'Microsoft'

Lazy Blogger Blog Post: Sunday Edition

March 23rd, 2008 · No Comments · Information Markets, Lazy Blogger Blog Post

From The Economist, a lovely story about the value of social networking. First, some choice quotes. Both deals [Microsoft buying Hotmail and AOL buying Bebo], in their respective decades, illustrate a great paradox of the internet in that the premise underlying them is precisely half right and half wrong. The correct half is that a [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:·········

“Better Than Free” … Wouldn’t That Be Free-er (er, More Free)?

February 7th, 2008 · No Comments · Information Markets

Kevin Kelly has written something that seems to be getting a lot of attention – Better Than Free. The article essentially lists out various ways that companies can add value to their information goods, and hence a price greater than free (a word beautiful to the consumer, hated by entrepreneurs and companies). The fundamental insight [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:·······

Online Ads Are Here To … Be Blocked

February 4th, 2008 · 1 Comment · Other Markets

I once wrote an article called Ads Are Here To Stay. Perhaps I was naive back then (or maybe wise, who knows), but it seemed to me (and perhaps everyone else) that online ads were on their way to becoming a permanent fixture of the web, paying as they did for all of that free, [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:·············

Search Engines Dominate Searching? I Don’t Buy It

January 8th, 2008 · 1 Comment · Other Markets

It is often said that the search engines Google, Microsoft, Ask, and Yahoo dominate almost 99% of all online searches. There is no doubt that these giants do dominate searching for web pages, but how many people search for just web pages these days? Let me give you a simple example. You don’t use Google [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:········

The Mac is Back

October 23rd, 2007 · 3 Comments · Other Markets, Usability

Apple lovers, who have been crowing over the success of Apple’s iPod for a while now, have yet another reason to feel good. Today, as reported by the FT, Apple announced that Mac sales lift[ed] Apple profits by 67%. A knee-jerk response might be that consumers are finally learning to appreciate Apple’s superior product usability. [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:····

The Bug Market

February 2nd, 2007 · No Comments · Other Markets

In Tuesday’s NY Times there is this very interesting article about the market for software bugs. (Times Select only.) The market is not very liquid at the moment, being, essentially, a black market, but if Microsoft gets involved (buying back their own bugs, ironically enough), then the market just might get a bit more liquid. [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:·

Book Review: Reinventing the Bazaar, A Natural History of Markets

September 28th, 2006 · No Comments · Book Reviews

This review first appeared in the Non-Joiners Book Club, a Yahoo Group. Those of us who are not economists experience markets as they are — without thinking much about how they were designed or how they work. eBay is an excellent example of a market that we all know, probably even use, without a deep [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:····················

Selling Infomation Markets to the Corporate World

May 7th, 2006 · 2 Comments · Prediction Markets

I am fairly new to the area of information markets, but one thing has become abundantly clear to me: selling the concept of information markets to businesses and government agencies is not going as well as perhaps it was thought it would. I’m sure some people thought that James Surowiecki’s popular business book would do [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:·················