Blogs, news aggregators, and craigslist represent disruptive technologies to the traditional print media industry. When they were first on the radar, they were so low margin and small market that any newspaper would have been crazy to take resources away from its existing business model. Why have writers spend time blogging, which has no advertising revenue opportunity, when they could be working on content for the print side, which makes money? Newspapers rationally kept their resources trained on their existing revenue engines.

I could go on, and probably do a poor job summarizing the book. It’s an interesting read — very informative as we see old business die and new ones spring up.

Innovation often involves abandoning an old, expensive process in favor of a new, cheaper one.

I completely agree. No problem is ever perfectly understood, so continually asking what lies at the root of the problem and questioning the status quo are vital activities for improving the degree to which the needs of customers/users/readers/citizens/etc. are met.

Actually, no they don’t. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there are a lot of people in Toronto

Yes, this is part of a trend others have noticed, too. I call it the intelligent relocalization of labor. One thing that interests me about it is that is happening in so many area, and here it is in manufacturing, where the design of a whole class of products has been influenced by this process. Of course this is also more sustainable:

http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2006/10/22/globalization-de-materialized-in-176-clicks/

BTW, Glad to see you started your own blog.