The Economics of the Internet of Things

摘要

Product companies compete by building ever bigger factories to turn out ever cheaper widgets. But a very different sort of economics comes into play when those widgets start to communicate. It's called the network effect-when each new user of a product makes its value higher. Think of the telephone a century ago. The greater the number of people who used Bell's invention, the more valuable it became to all of them. The telephone became a platform for countless new businesses its inventor never imagined.