On Sunday 15 March 2009 14:55:43 Dave Crossland wrote: > 2009/3/15 Kevin Anderson <global...@gmail.com>: > > As for Clay's piece, it's one of the best of a kind. I would say that > > much of the discussion here is confusing public funding with a business > > model. > > I think the phrase "business model" is colloquially used as "funding > model for people for whom the Internet is dissolving the funding model > they previously relied upon" rather than "profiteering scheme for > shareholders"
I think business model is the right term when talking about how something is going to make money, to me it seems to include distribution, revenue generation, and operations in general. What people seem to miss is that when they want to take advantage of a new method of distribution, they need to make allowances for it in other areas. The classic example of this is the Music business, when moving from a physical distribution model (CD's) to an online one (downloads) they, initially at least, assumed that they could continue to do what they were doing in the physical sphere, charge £9.99 for a singe, £20+ for an album, only allow one copy (utilising whatever DRM scheme was flavour of the week) and pass on the same money to the artists (less breakages...) and no one would care. They were clearly wrong, people didn't want to pay inflated prices for something that only worked under certain conditions, especially not when they could rip their existing music collection (which hadn't really been easily possible in previous changes, from Record to tape, or tape to CD). So rather than being able to charge everyone to gain access to their existing record collections again (as they had essentially been able to do previously) they were faced with a decline in sales, and a model that was being challenged by the fact many people were happy to swap copies of music without restriction. They failed to adjust their business model along with everything else, and failed to deal with the threat they faced from outside. It is the same with almost anything that can be distributed electronically, and, I fear it will be along time until businesses realise just how different the world is when a perfect digital copy can be provided to thousands if not millions of people, with little or no investment. Of course in the music industry's case, the solution they sought was one of legislation, not something that endeared them to their previous and potential customer bases. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
