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Standards wars involve lots of variables, and understanding them often seems more an art than a science. They generally involve just two big players, and end in a winner-take-all situation.

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Two
Player
Variables
Ends
Situation
Involve
Seems
Understanding
Winner
Take
Bigs
Wars
War
Lots
Often
Players
Science
Generally
Art
Standards

More quotes by James Surowiecki

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In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap.
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The profit motive, indecorous though it may seem, may represent the best chance the poor have to reap some of globalization's benefits.
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If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources.
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Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing.
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Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.
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If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.
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In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.
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If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the expense of the slow-moving giants of the Fortune 500, apparently you were wrong.
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The truth is that the United States doesn't need, and shouldn't have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.
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Campaigns fail if they waste resources courting voters who are unpersuadable or already persuaded. Their most urgent task is to find and persuade the few voters who are genuinely undecided and the larger number who are favorably disposed but need a push to actually vote.
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All things being equal, letting people make decisions for themselves will produce smarter outcomes, collectively, than relying on government planners.
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Being out of a job can erode people's confidence and their sense of possibility and employers, often unfairly, tend to take long-term unemployment as a signal that something is wrong.
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What an economy really wants, after all, is not more investment per se but better investment. It wants capital to flow to companies that will create value - not in the form of a rising stock price but in the form of more goods for less cost, more jobs, and rising wages - by enhancing productivity.
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Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.
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Life insurance became popular only when insurance companies stopped emphasizing it as a good investment and sold it instead as a symbolic commitment by fathers to the future well-being of their families.
James Surowiecki
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The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich.
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In industries where a lot of competitors are selling the same product - mangoes, gasoline, DVD players - price is the easiest way to distinguish yourself. The hope is that if you cut prices enough you can increase your market share, and even your profits. But this works only if your competitors won't, or can't, follow suit.
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If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less.
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Markets work best when there's lots of information available and a historical track record to go on they excel at predicting things like horse races, election outcomes, and box-office results. But they're bad at predicting things like who will be the next Supreme Court nominee, as that depends on the whim of the president.
James Surowiecki
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Breaking tasks down into smaller sub-tasks can be very useful.
James Surowiecki