Monday, August 18, 2008

New technology

How do business deal with new technology that threatens to provide an alternative product?

Economic Principals
looks at the way that the newspaper industry has to adapt.

Those enormous rolls of newsprint, tank-cars of ink, long lines of presses and fleets of delivery vans are the newspaper industry’s best friends. Among business strategists, they are known as barriers to entry. The capacity to print and deliver the paper product from cities around the world is what makes newspapers different from everything and everyone else in this media-sodden world. Precisely from all this impedimenta – and the paper product it produces – does the authority of newspapers’ increasingly extensive Web-based operations derive.

The example of the radio and television can provide some insight. Radio has its own strength. It is particularly powerful when you cannot watch a picture because you are doing something else. The strength of the newspaper is that it can be passed around. In some ways it is much easier to find things. The newspapers have the advantage of having good, clear links to the sources of information. That have reputation.

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