Nick Carr gets at much of the flawed thinking on the New York Times metering content. In essence, The Times are introducing a new product, at a new price point. Another way of thinking about it is they have attracted a monumentally large number of beta users and are now looking to convert those to paying customers. More from Nick…

Jarvis might want to spend some time reading about the fundamentals of pricing, particularly Hal Varian’s classic work on the "versioning" of digital goods. Varian is a distinguished economist who teaches at Berkeley and is also now Google’s chief economist. Here’s a little of what he says about "versioning information goods," which is extremely pertinent to the Times’s strategy as well as the news and media business in general:

One prominent feature of information goods is that they have large fixed costs of production, and small variable costs of reproduction. Cost-based pricing makes little sense in this context; value-based pricing is much more appropriate. Different consumers may have radically different values for a particular information good, so techniques for differential pricing become very important … [One] particular aspect of differential pricing [is] known as quality discrimination or versioning … The point of versioning is to get the consumers to sort themselves into different groups according to their willingness to pay. Consumers with high willingness to pay choose one version, while consumers with lower willingnesses to pay choose a different version. The producer chooses the versions so as to induce the consumers to “self select” into appropriate categories …

[Consider the case] in which the seller knows something about the distribution of willingness to pay [WTP] in the population, but cannot identify the willingness to pay of a given consumer. In this case the seller cannot base its price on an exogenous observable characteristic such as membership in some group, but can base its price on an endogenous characteristic such as the quality of the choice the consumer purchases. The appropriate strategy for the seller in this situation is to choose two qualities and associated prices and offer them to the consumers. Each of the different consumer types will [select] one of the two quality/price pairs. The seller wants to choose the qualities and prices of the packages offered so as to maximize profit.

The intention is to get the consumers to self-select into the high- and low-WTP groups by setting price and quality appropriately. That is, the seller wants to choose price/quality packages so that the consumers with high WTP choose the high-price/high-quality package, and the consumers with low WTP choose the low-price/low-quality package.

Jonathan posts a great note as Sun merges with Oracle. I was lucky enough to be a part of Sun for a number of years. He’s right, there are many remarkable people there. Oracle is going to be even more remarkable as a result.

For those of you that watch Football of the American kind, here’s an interesting stat from the WSJ — some have called the NFL “triumph of project management over sport”, I call it “the triumph of marketing over sport”. Here’s why:

According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.

In other words, if you tally up everything that happens between the time the ball is snapped and the play is whistled dead by the officials, there’s barely enough time to prepare a hard-boiled egg. In fact, the average telecast devotes 56% more time to showing replays…. the ratio of inaction to action is approximately 10 to 1.

Stowe flags a nice quote from John Hagel and Thomas Friedman that highlights the shift into the Participatory Era – a characteristic of which will be a move from “store” to “stream”.

John Hagel, the noted business writer and management consultant argues in his recently released “Shift Index” that we’re in the midst of “The Big Shift.” We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks — the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace — into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows, which are constantly being renewed.

“Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important,” says Hagel. “Since there are far more smart people outside any one organization than inside.” And in today’s flat world, you can now access them all. Therefore, the more your company or country can connect with relevant and diverse sources to create new knowledge, the more it will thrive. And if you don’t, others will.

And I agree with Stowe – a key determinant of business success will be the power of it’s network. I don’t think this will be defined in terms of, say, number of followers, but rather, degree of participation and contribution.