Word: arthur
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...What the country lacked, until Menotti came along, was a multidimensional festival that both took over a city and took advantage of its architecture and history. During the Menotti era, Spoleto USA benefited and suffered from his increasingly conservative and capricious tastes. There were some noteworthy premieres, such as Arthur Miller's play The American Clock, Martha Clarke's dance Miracolo d'Amore and the Philip Glass-Allen Ginsberg opera Hydrogen Jukebox. But the constant wrangling between Menotti and the festival board-frequently over works the director found objectionable-diminished both Menotti and the festival. As a result, Spoleto...
...Duane Arthur Stewart...
...value of a telephone network increases with each new phone added to the system (because it gives everyone on the network one more person to call), so does the value of a computer system increase with each program that runs on it. This is what Stanford economist Brian Arthur calls the law of increasing returns-a twist on the classic law of diminishing returns...
...desperate are programmers for a stable computer standard that they will latch on to the first one that works-whether or not it is the best. A case in point, says Arthur, is ms-dos. "Microsoft dos for any serious user is a crummy operating system," he says. "But Microsoft got there first and played its market advantages extremely intelligently...
Using a strategy Arthur calls "target, leverage, link and lock," Microsoft proceeded to convert dos users to Windows users, Windows users to Word users and so on down the product line. Microsoft's customers, of course, were free to switch to WordPerfect for Windows or Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows or any other competing products. But by the time those programs were ready, Microsoft already owned the markets. "You could argue," says Arthur, "that Microsoft is the product of clever strategy, mediocre technology and a hell of a lot of increasing returns...