Archive for December, 2009

Redmond Back on Offense

The Wild West era of the Internet has been slowly winding down in recent years. The seminal event may have been the beat-down the music industry played on Napster. But the past several weeks have been even more interesting. It turns out that Murdoch and Microsoft are planning something quite innovative – that frankly represents a classic disruptive approach to the Internet. As pretty much everyone has learned, the plan is to limit access to Murdoch’s news content to searches conducted through Microsoft’s Bing search engine. We assume Microsoft will pay Murdoch an unspecified royalty for that content, or for the number of users accessing it, or employ another similar usage-based payment schedule. What does that mean?

Read the rest of this entry »