I believe I have discovered an important reason why the government has a hard time making good use of the Internet: people who design systems for the government abhor messy data. They are used to setups in which every record is complete because the people populating the records are forced by law or regulation to fill them out entirely. As we are learning on the web though, the best systems arise from rather messy data. Let’s say you are a marketplace site. Should you have a listing process th...

I believe I have discovered an important reason why the government has a hard time making good use of the Internet: people who design systems for the government abhor messy data. They are used to setups in which every record is complete because the people populating the records are forced by law or regulation to fill them out entirely. As we are learning on the web though, the best systems arise from rather messy data. Let’s say you are a marketplace site. Should you have a listing process th...

During the industrial age, economies of scale were a major source of competitive advantage. Many production processes exhibited decreasing unit costs over a very large range of output. Steel was a classic example which resulted in a few very large steel companies dominating the market (at least until the rise of mini mills which made steel from scrap). The defensibility of scale in the information age is a lot less clear. Why? Because there are companies that are providing scale to others. Am...

During the industrial age, economies of scale were a major source of competitive advantage. Many production processes exhibited decreasing unit costs over a very large range of output. Steel was a classic example which resulted in a few very large steel companies dominating the market (at least until the rise of mini mills which made steel from scrap). The defensibility of scale in the information age is a lot less clear. Why? Because there are companies that are providing scale to others. Am...

Yesterday, I had a fascinating lunch with some very bright folks from the Gates Foundation. In addition to public health, the Gates Foundation appears to be ramping up its activities in education. A key topic at the lunch was the impact of the web on education. The discussion really helped clarify my own thinking about what the critical missing element is (at least so far): scale. Scale on the web is unlike anything that we have seen before. Facebook recently announced that they crossed 300 m...

Yesterday, I had a fascinating lunch with some very bright folks from the Gates Foundation. In addition to public health, the Gates Foundation appears to be ramping up its activities in education. A key topic at the lunch was the impact of the web on education. The discussion really helped clarify my own thinking about what the critical missing element is (at least so far): scale. Scale on the web is unlike anything that we have seen before. Facebook recently announced that they crossed 300 m...