The High Cost of a Cheap Lesson

With a bit of effort, any technically skilled person can learn the latest information in their industry. That is so whether it concerns the design for a product, such as Apple´s iPod, or involves demand for a newly deployed service, such as municipal Wi-Fi in a distant city. Although industry conferences, consulting reports, and trade magazines have always informed market participants, today these sources are supplemented by Web pages and community or industry forums. Any reasonably sized product market attracts an abundance of product reviewers and bloggers who track gossip about business initiatives and point out design flaws or triumphs. This article focuses on market experiment phenomenon: commodifying and accumulating lessons must go hand in hand. While that observation may sound excessively abstract, it is grounded in the experience of many markets