Conservation of attractive profits

Tim O’Reilly talked about the “law of conservation of attractive profits” in a recent interview on the FLOSS Weekly podcast. Clayton Christensen explained this law in an HBR report in 2004. It says that when one thing becomes modular and commoditized, another thing becomes valuable.

O’Reilly argues that just as computers made out of commodity hardware made software more valuable, now commodity software and open standards have made data more valuable.

Taking this line of reasoning one step further, open data makes analysis more valuable. Good news for experts in statistics and machine learning.

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