

8 questions you need to ask about your business model - DarrenH
http://thebln.com/2011/09/8-essential-questions-you-need-to-ask-about-your-business-model-guest-blog-by-alex-osterwalder/

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Hyena
Their first example falls flat, since software (like iTunes) can search for
music and also simply read the database of other systems. Getting others to do
your work for you is unethical; either they do the work because that's
actually a feature for the consumer or you're stealing from people. Anything
else is customers doing their work for themselves and you acting smug.

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marklittlewood
I don't think that means it falls flat. It was one of the key things that
moved people across. I remember copying CDs into iTunes, downloading stuff
from iTunes and putting all my music together. It was only when I got a non
Apple MP3 player that I realised that all the Apple content wouldn't play on
other systems.

Kept me locked in for years.

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Hyena
That's weird, since I had an iPod from the beginning and I don't remember this
issue. So far as I recall, iTunes spat out MP3s and getting access to all of
it was a simple matter of using the search function of Windows, something yu
had to do anyway even in the days of burning unless you had super awesome
memory.

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lurker19
GP was alluding to the .aap or whatever the extension was for DRM-laden tracks
sold by ITMS.

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6ren
Yes, they had DRM for the first 6 years:
<http://www.macworld.com/article/138000/2009/01/drm_faq.html>

It seems true that the labels required this; and it was just serendipitous for
Apple that it locked-in users. Although... Amazon dropped the DRM a year
earlier (it seems). So it _sounds_ like Apple exploited this good fortune to
the hilt, and then some...

It reminds me of how Apple forbids Flash - it's _true_ that flash runs very
slowly on mobile hardware; and also that most flash applications are designed
for the mouse and don't work ideally with multi-touch; and that this runs
counter to Apple's focus on the consumer experience. It's just serendipitous
that this leads developers to create exclusive content for iOS, and gain
expertise in iOS and Apple's toolchain, which also have sticky qualities (they
take effort to learn, and it's not transferable to other platforms).

New products often have natural competitive advantage in many different
aspects. It's up to you to find them. It's not something you can just make up
for the purposes of _having_ a competitive advantage because if you can't
"blame" some real factor for it, customers will hate you for it. So, just
_recognize_ those competitive advantages, and don't stuff them up.

Perhaps one approach is to look for possible competitive advantages, and ask
if any of them will also happen to give some great benefit to users, that they
value.

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vetleen
Interesting questions, indeed. But i feel they miss a point by not mentioning
a single remedy to a low score. The conclusion doesn't make sense to me:

"(...) by asking yourself these questions and by scoring well on at least some
of them you are very likely to substantially increase the long-term
competitive advantage of your business."

Wouldn't you need to actually increase the score to increase competitiveness?

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lurker19
Title starts with an irrelevant number.

