There are, very obviously, some things that absolutely are illegitimate tying and bundling. But how do you capture that without capturing everything else? There is a huge grey area between telling Microsoft it can’t force OEMs to bundle Office with Windows and telling Microsoft that it has to make consumers choose their network stack when they turn... See more

For a long time there were two basic ways to organize human work: a firm and a marketplace. A firm, such as a company, had definite boundaries, was permission based, and enabled people to increase their efficiency via collaboration more than if they worked outside the firm. A marketplace had more permeable borders, required no permission to partici

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The basic forces don’t change, but the tactics have become more complicated. Moreover, we are seeing a new effect which was just barely visible in the prior decade, the piggybacking of one company’s offer on another to skip the chasm entirely and jump straight into hypergrowth. In the 1980s Lotus piggybacked on VisiCalc to accomplish this feat in t

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EBay had an enormous advantage over the competition that it only then, under challenge, was coming to appreciate: a nicely balanced critical mass of sellers and buyers in each of hundreds of categories. This delicate balance had been achieved through the natural evolution of the eBay ecosystem, without the intervention of any guiding hand. If in an

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