The collapse of the old

I've just read a very interesting article by Clay Sharky "The Collapse of Complex Business Models". His general argument feels sound and its specific object, the television industry, looks to me like an industry about to undergo violent reconfiguration. Whereas the music industry seems to be returning to the staple business model of the past - live performance* - television can't return to being cinema. 


* See David Bowie (2002 New York Times), TechDirt (2009), Brian Eno (2009), and Brian Eno ("On the end of and era")

Hardware or Software

I'm a reader of Jonathan Schwartz's blog. He's the CEO of Sun Microsystems and, interestingly, is a software person by background. In his most recent posting, he made a very interesting point about where the value is in systems - hardware or software. Jonathan said:

"I was talking to a software analyst today who wanted to know why we bothered with the hardware business when so much value was in our software assets - this is a perfect example, the value isn't in the software or the hardware, it's in the systems we build with both."

I thought this very insightful and a point that deserves a lot of thought.