Yeah, and economists have had a better word for it since 1933: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_differentiation

My issue was more about how many paragraphs the writer wrote to explain what you just did in a sentence (or two).

Kudos.

His point is a little broader because he also questions the shared assumptions that underly our educational systems.

I often hear that American and European schools are produce better students than Asian schools because they place less emphasis on rote learning and more on independent thinking but my impression is that's much less true now than it might have been 20 years ago.

I agree it is a strange term.

I do think however the article is well written and quite insightful based of course on Peter Thiel's ideas.

Inovation always wins, those that focus on just competing will lose. A country has to foster inovation. the countries that innovate in education could be the big winners.

To be fare to the US, some of there big colleges do that, but it does seem at the grass roots of the system it needs change and that applies to a lot of countries.

Product differentiation is in every first year university marketing textbook. As much as those textbooks try to use as many words as possible to describe a simple concept, their description of product differentiation is likely to be much shorter than the one in this article.

MBA's might not be good hires in a $100,000 startup, but they know more than we think.

Greed. Torture. Monopoly. Everything that was once a sin or a crime in America is now excused, reinterpreted, and finally praised.