At first it was (sometimes) amusing when the airlines started instituting their new fees.  They smelled of desperation, but at least a few made logical sense.  Premium pricing for exit row seats?  Okay, I get it.  Early checkin fee on Southwest?  Not a problem.
You see, every day consumers are faced with basic cost-value decisions.  I can buy a $20 pair of jeans, or a $120 pair – they will both keep my legs warm.  

My local gas station is driving me crazy.  Every time I insert my credit card to buy gas, it displays the message “Do you want to buy a carwash?” Every time I say “No”.   And the next time I visit, they ask me again.
This is probably a trivial complaint, and I realize that the classic “upsell” is a standard part of doing business.  I even wrote an article about how impressed I was with my tire dealer’s “captive upsell”.  Nevertheless, this gas station is doing it completely wrong.  The classic …

I think that I want an Amazon Kindle.  As a self-professed early adopter of gadgets, the Kindle should certainly rank near the top of my list.  I wish the product did more (touch screen, color, play movies, etc.) but I’ll just have to wait for the future Apple tablet to give me another multimedia toy.   At $299 it is also fairly expensive as noted by many reviewers, but that hasn’t stopped me from buying cool technology before.
So why haven’t I taken the plunge?  Because I have at least a dozen …

We had a pest control salesman come to our house yesterday evening (we think we might have some mice in our attic, and more than our share of spiders).  As we were walking through our house I found myself cataloging in my mind all the different sales tactics that he was using.
First, he wanted to distinguish himself from the competition – presumably so that if I decided to use someone, it would be them. He pointed out that all their employees have to go through trainings and certifications every month.  …

If the success of a book was based on the number of pages that I underlined or wrote notes on, then Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson might become the most successful book of all time.  Obviously that probably won’t happen, but by the time I finished my pen was out of ink.
What struck me first were the incredible number of examples – not just the known examples like Google and Facebook, but many companies and products that I had never heard of before.  Did you …

Over time new business models are often created by innovative startups that begin to threaten an incumbent’s business.  The incumbent’s unwillingness to change, which often leads to its eventual disruption, is a subject written in various ways and in numerous books and articles (including the Innovator’s Dilemma – see the About page of this website).  So I certainly can’t take credit for the theory, but I enjoy seeing theory play out in different industries.
In the technology world, probably the most prevalent example of this is the difference between perpetual licensing …

As the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch.   With disruptive innovation, someone is the disruptor and someone else is the disrupted.   Unfortunately the government may be increasingly on the wrong side of this equation.
An interesting article was penned by Joe Weisenthal titled “Internet Startups will Destroy the Government”.  A catchy title sure to lure tech entrepreneurs (and some would-be anarchists too).