Author Archives: Diane Coyle

A Great British success story

Posted on by

One of the activities in which the UK has a comparative advantage is creating video games – maybe this shouldn’t be at all surprising in a country with an illustrious history of creativity of all types. A new book, [amazon_link id=”1845137043″ target=”_blank” ]Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World[/amazon_link] by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene, describes its accidental growth.

Part of the story involves the deliberate policy of encouraging innovation in personal computers. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro play a key role in the development of today’s games industry. As the book notes, “These home-grown machines democratised access to computers and made simple programming skills commonplace – for a while Britain may have been the most computer literate country in the world.” So a key lesson there for the debate about teaching coding skills in schools now.

Just as interesting, though, is the grassroots nature of the early days of the industry. “In the early 1980s the British games market saw one of the most spontaneous, fragmented and lively proliferations of creativity in its history …. British gaming didn’t feel at all corporate: it was ad hoc, unstructured and rather parochial.” Professionalisation followed reasonably quickly, but my reading is that this unstructured and chaotic phase was vital.

This book is based mainly on interviews with key people in the industry. It’s a fascinating business history, that ends up with the Raspberry Pi, whose founders are hoping to repeat the burst of creativity Britain enjoyed in the 1980s. “There’s a fierce hope that the traits that first inspired the British games industry – passionate home coders, a market flourishing with ideas – are robust enough to take hold again.”

[amazon_image id=”1845137043″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders: How British Videogames Conquered the World[/amazon_image]

Technology and the conquest of time

Posted on by

Last night I stayed up late reading (not yet quite finishing) a marvellous book by Rebecca Solnit, [amazon_link id=”0747568413″ target=”_blank” ]Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge[/amazon_link]. I discovered her writing last year, when I wolfed down [amazon_link id=”1841957453″ target=”_blank” ]A Field Guide To Getting Lost [/amazon_link]and [amazon_link id=”1844675580″ target=”_blank” ]Wanderlust: A History of Walking[/amazon_link].

This 2003 book is a reflection on technology, nature and society. Muybridge took the famous series of photographs revealing motion to human eyes – as Solnit puts it: “With photography, they would come to see faster what had been hidden in time, and then to reconstruct those moments in time.” All technology really is about the conquest of time in one way or another.

Muybridge was first commissioned by Leland Stanford, one of the railroad magnates. The railroads are part of the story too, “the co-ordination of systems of technology with political and economic power.” Stanford’s reach over technology continues through the university his railroad-earned money enabled him to found. All fascinating – a reflective, poetic companion to another terrific book, Tom Standage’s [amazon_link id=”0753807033″ target=”_blank” ]The Victorian Internet[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0747568413″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge[/amazon_image]

The chemistry of entrepreneurship

Posted on by

An intriguing volume has arrived in the post, [amazon_link id=”0691148872″ target=”_blank” ]The Emergence of Organizations and Markets [/amazon_link] edited by John F Padgett and Walter W Powell. It’s a tome, rather, a series of essays combining sociology and biochemistry to analyse a range of organisational innovations – partnerships in Renaissance Florence, the joint stock company in Calvinist Holland, Communism in the Societ Union, oligarchy in post-Soviet Russia. There’s also a section on entrepreneurship in modern capitalism. I’m not sure I’m going to sit down and read it, but will dip into the introductory chapter, The Problem of Emergence, and report back.

[amazon_image id=”0691148872″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Emergence of Organizations and Markets[/amazon_image]

The other squeezed middle

Posted on by

It’s been a busy week of dawn to dusk meetings, but I did manage to finish Jack Rakove’s [amazon_link id=”0099551861″ target=”_blank” ]Revolutionaries: Inventing An American Nation[/amazon_link] on election night (before going to sleep, secure in my eldest son’s confidence in Nate Silver). For a British reader like me, this bit of history is unfamiliar – I can’t imagine why, but it tends to be glossed over in the curriculum in our schools. However, even for American readers, the approach is probably quite fresh – not strictly chronological but thematic essays, each of which uses some key characters as the narrative driver. And for anybody, of course, it’s interesting to consider the dysfunctionality of modern American politics in the light of this foundational period.

Consider, for example, this passage:

“To be a political moderate during this final crisis [1776] meant something more than holding a middle ground between radicals like the Adamses and future turncoats like Joseph Galloway [who he?]. Moderation did not mean keeping an open mind about rival claims or seeking to balance clashing points of view. Nor were moderates the 18th century version of undecided voters, unsure of their own views or trimming their sails to any passing political breeze. Moderation is better considered as a political position in its own right …. the moderate political leaders … did possess a distinct set of attitudes.”

Surely this is just as true of today’s ‘disenfranchised’ middle? Of course, the 18th century moderates got squeezed out by events that fed extreme views. That’s the trouble with turbulent times.

I was also very struck by the sections on George Washington and the advantage he gained from thinking strategically – that is, more than one move ahead – especially when pitted against wishful thinking on the other side. As noted in my recent post, (Strategic) thinking is hard to do, this is a vanishingly rare skill, so obviously something that our human nature doesn’t equip us for. In contrast to wishful thinking – for a prize example of which, see Jon Stewart on the Fox News coverage on Tuesday night.

[amazon_image id=”0099551861″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Revolutionaries: Inventing an American Nation[/amazon_image]

Random penguins and platforms

Posted on by

In an interesting article about the Random Penguin publishing merger, John Naughton describes the dynamic of gigantism in publishing that paved the way for the clash of the Titans between publishers and Amazon. High street book retailers consolidated, causing publishers in turn to develop mass market blockbusters, which prompted agents to seek mega-advances for star writers, such that the publishers and retailers had to sweat those expensive assets….

As Naughton writes: “Thus publishing turned into an industry that was inordinately reliant on blockbuster products to deliver the results that Wall Street demanded. The result was a market characterised by what statisticians call a power law distribution – ie one in which a relatively small number of products sell in enormous volume while a “long tail” of other products sell in relatively modest quantities. The physical world of high street shops can’t handle a long tail for the simple reason that shelf-space costs money. Every book has to earn its rent. But internet outfits such as Amazon don’t have any problem handling the long tail; in fact, the company probably makes more from selling non-bestsellers than it does from blockbusters.”

He cites [amazon_link id=”0745661068″ target=”_blank” ]Merchants of Culture[/amazon_link] by John Thompson as a good sociological description of how publishing and bookselling have changed.

[amazon_image id=”0745661068″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Merchants of Culture[/amazon_image]

As I noted in a previous post about the publishing merger, though, Amazon is also interesting as a platform for smaller publishers, who would never be able to get shelf space in a high street store. I’m no fan of the Kindle, including because – as John Naughton and others have pointed out – you’re only renting the book. No doubt other already big publishers will also start to discuss mergers, so it will be intriguing to see whether Amazon does become a genuine platform for small publishers. Platforms are inherently few in number, so the acid test will be the terms on which it continues to deal with them will be the acid test, and one the competition authorities will no doubt be thinking about.