Certeiro

The great myth of the digital age was that once we got rid of those expensive printing presses there would be no barriers to entry and costs would come down. But guess what? It costs a lot of money to build a system like Amazon's. An even bigger barrier to entry is brainpower. You need armies of smart engineers to build and run these online stores. There simply aren't enough of these brainiacs to go around. The result is that few companies on the planet can build what Google, Amazon and Apple have built. This is probably what Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, meant when he recently praised Google as being surrounded by a moat, and that "their moat is filled with sharks." So the game is the same today as it was in the old days. The only question is where the money will end up. In the analog world the lion's share of the money ended up in the hands of big, bad media barons. This time around, the geeks in Silicon Valley are pocketing all the dough. Ironically enough, they present themselves as a bunch of pious, sweet-natured nerds who aren't doing this for the money—they're all about making the world a better place. The truth is that when it comes to exploitation, the new guys make those old media barons look like a bunch of amateurs. (Daniel Lyons)

[Leia o resto aqui.]