sbtest

'Net relative to other course of action' is the tricky bit. I find it hard to believe that investing in 15 people at $15 million, or 150 at a million, or however you want to break it out, would not be a better alternative. The issue of CEO pay boils down to how skewed you view the distribution of talent among a population and how much a single person makes a difference in an organization. Personally I think success is more of a function of collective or distributed intelligence, and perhaps if a single person is so pivotal compared to nearly everyone else in an organization that is more of a reflection of poor organizational structure that is not distributing responsibility and power sensibly. At the very least that sort of corporate structure could hardly be viewed as a robust system. Thats not criticize this particular case, but highly skewed compensation in general.

The sparrow case aside, there does seem to be limited prospects for sustaining a business focused on producing high quality apps. There seems to be very few patterns for success; e.g. acqusition, serialization of a single hit game, or a store with an overlay requiring the least possible effort to produce. Obviously exceptions can be found, but the idea that the app environment could be modified to make other types of businesses more viable likely has some truth to it.

Its only confusing if you still view Amazon as a book retailer or even book + X + Y retailer. They are a retailer of all categories of goods. Using ebooks as a loss leader to dominate a far broader market is a fairly straight-forward strategy.

What concerns me is behavioral information obtained through games (particularly ones of the push-a-button, get point variety) could be used to target individuals with addictive personalities. Combining this with information from the social graph would even be more potent. The second a person turns 18, they will know all of the 'white whales' that should be brought in to play the slots. The ethics of psychological profiling will soon be a major ethical issue brought to us courtesy of big data; an issue that has implications well beyond gambling.