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Just what market are you in?

Step One To Embracing A Lack Of Scarcity: Recognize What Market You’re Really In

This is my latest post in the ongoing series of posts about economics when scarcity is removed from certain items. Two weeks ago, in my post about the 17th century button makers and how they were quite like the RIAA in many ways got plenty of attention, and that kicked off a fun discussion. Many people (phew) saw the connection, but a few did not, and claimed that the situations were entirely different.

[via Techdirt]

An exemplary article twice over: for its spearing of the idiotic behaviour of the RIAA in trying to halt an inexorably incoming tide; and for the accompanying message that anyone in business needs to think carefully what their market really is. What do our customers actually want? as opposed to what we happen to be trying to sell them.

We in the web development sector ought to see ourselves more as providing tools for marketing, trading, and communication over the Internet than as being great at writing HTML or Ajax widgets. Our services are the means to certain ends; and to keep being successful we need to focus on those ends because they are what our customers really care about, not our precious technical skills.