“Nowadays in the digital world you can hardly own anything anymore. If you put things in the cloud, someone, somewhere might disappear it and it’s gone forever. When we grew up, ownership was what made America different than Russia.”

“Getting back to Costco: the abstract theorizing that MBA students learn in microeconomics courses often has little relevance to practical business situations. The simplified textbook models do teach the lesson that policies like unions and the minimum wage are wrong — that message comes through loud and clear. Economics as it’s taught in most American colleges today encourages poor labor practices. No wonder why Costco prefers its own cart-pushers to fancy MBA bean counters. Costco’s business model relies on investing in its workers. It’s one you won’t find in a standard MBA textbook, and yet it is paying off in spades for stockholders, employees, and customers alike. Maybe they know something that the management consultant class doesn’t. And maybe it’s about time the rest of corporate America start paying attention.”

“In the short term, Tumblr has redefined what success means for technology companies: sleek, cool, and nonpaying users are more important than revenue and profit. All of a sudden, success is no longer the moment when an emerging company crosses the financial threshold to where cash flow, margins, and market share increase and incremental expenses decrease. Tumblr’s way is a lot easier. It will not stand the test of time, but for now, every upstart technology chief executive is going to try to win the next lottery the way Tumblr did. And about 99 percent will fail.”

“Few products are so underpriced that an entire subsidiary industry exists to take advantage of the discrepancy. When there is excess demand for a new car or phone, some people might sell theirs at a markup on eBay, but there’s nobody across the street from the dealership or Best Buy offering it right away for double the sticker price; there certainly isn’t an entire corporation built on exploiting companies’ failure to properly price items initially. Yet concerts and sporting events consistently price their tickets low enough that street scalpers risk jail time to hawk marked-up tickets, and StubHub makes hundreds of millions a year in revenue.”

“Everywhere I turned I came across industry members who are way too focused on current channels and products. They’re happy that 20-30% of their revenues are coming from “digital”; of course, by “digital” they mean quick-and-dirty print-to-e conversions, print-under-glass, or any one of a number of other descriptions of today’s ebook marketplace. Many of them will tell you privately that “the ebook revolution” was overblown, they’ve wasted way too many resources on speculative e-projects and now see no reason to throw more good money after bad on this front. The Digital Discovery Zone was a quaint little area set off by green carpeting and featuring about a dozen of the usual suspects, many of which are sponsors of the various industry conferences. It felt like walking through a petting zoo at your local state fair. I half expected someone to say, “wash your hands if you touch one of those animals, honey, you don’t want to spread any germs.” Isn’t it amazing that we still separate the “digital” players from the rest of the exhibitors at a major trade show?”

“Every time you fill a prescription at a drug store like Walgreens, the pharmacy keeps a record of the transaction, noting information such as your name, the drug, the dosage, and the issuing doctor. It’s a routine bit of bookkeeping, and for a long time it raised few eyebrows. Then a firm called IMS Health starting buying up the data. Mining pharmacy records, the company assembled profiles of hundreds of thousands of American doctors and millions of individual patients, with names and other identifying details encrypted. IMS Health turned around and sold access to those files to pharmaceutical companies, making it easier for the firms to target (and reward) the physicians most likely to prescribe expensive, brand-name drugs.”

“The e-book case to me is bizarre,” Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said during an onstage interview at a business conference last week in Southern California. “We’ve done nothing wrong there, and so we’re taking a very principled position of this. We were asked to sign something that says we did do something, and we’re not going to sign something that says we did something we didn’t do. And so we’re going to fight.”

“TV ratings have dropped by 50 percent over the last decade. Goldman Sachs recently called the decline “the sharpest pace on record.” The firm found that ratings in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic – the key group targeted by advertisers – fell by 17 percent last winter compared with the winter before.”