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The Master Switch: The Rise And Fall Of Information Empires (2010)

by Tim Wu(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0307269930 (ISBN13: 9780307269935)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: Mr. Wu has given us an important angle on business history: how the telephone, motion-pictures, TV network (broadcast and cable), and Internet companies not only created new communications media but how they fought off earlier ones, such as telegraph. The book shows how these companies prospered and came to monopolize their fields. More importantly, we learn how they could stifle innovation as well as create it: the painful experience with early FM radio, for instance, or how the few motion-picture studios could enforce a Decency Code, or the fact that voicemail, modems, fax, private (non-Bell) and the Net itself was possible only after the 1980s breakup of Ma Bell. The "vertical" integration of a medium, how, say, the movie studios could dominate not just production but d... moreistribution -- individual movie theaters and chains.We learn just how important patents can be, and how difficult it may be for the original inventor to keep control of his invention. Also, this book tells us how, time and again, past communications industries could stifle their competitors and the medium itself. This, above all, is a study of business, not how an innovation can succeed, not even how much money it can make for its owners, but just how much power it can create.Strongly recommend.
review 2: This book details how innovators change into empires that resist most innovation but eventually lose out to new innovations, a natural and seemingly ineluctable cycle. Revealing, in that it lowered my opinion of the corporate cultures of RCA, AT&T, Bell Telephone, Apple, and other empires of that ilk. It made it more clear to me, an erstwhile wage slave, that the business world is red in tooth and claw, in ledger and boardroom.The book concludes with an examination of the Internet, and sounds the clarion call of the need to protect net neutrality. less

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