Idleotica

The single most important lesson we learn from the short history of the consumer internet industry is that winning internet business models are engineered around consumers. In fact, consumer internet businesses must be designed, architecturally, to be more consumer centric than their physical world equivalents. This is because, fundamentally, the internet increases transparency and information availability to reduce friction, and thus shifts market power to users relative to physical world models. Therefore, competitors can and will exploit every opportunity to be more consumer centric, a dynamic fuelled by the quasi absence of barriers to entry into the industry.

(via fred-wilson)