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Information Valuation - The Most Buck for the Bits?
Rational asks: "I've heard of Everquest accounts sold for upwards of a thousand dollars... Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte. What are the most expensive pieces of information that you have heard of, in dollars per byte? Perhaps satellite pictures? The Human genome?"
Interesting question. Ok, here we go - a test of my history abilities. I am calculating from united states and soviet union only, not factoring UK/Canada/Austrila, etc, etc. Not to offend anybody or in anyway diminish there contribution but this I don't wnat this to turn into an all day project.
United States
10% (avg) of GDP from 1941-42
37% of GDP from 1942-1945 (avg)
GDP(in billions) 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945
113.5 144.2 180.0 209.0 221.1
Defense Spending: 11.4 53.4 66.0 77.3 81.8
Total Defense: $289.6 Billion (note: roughly 1/3 of this went to the pacific theatre)
Casulties: 292 000 dead (estimating cost of lives is NOT something I am going to do)
Soviet Union
Casulties: 13.6 million armed forces, 7.7 million civilian dead (note: roughly 1/2 of those who entered service in soviet military where either killed or wounded. Estimate the cost of that!)
Note: No official records of cost of WWII to Soviet Union have ever been released (that I know of or could find). Estimates are on the order of $350 billion counting damage to infrastructure, etc.
Soviet Union (350) + US (191.1) cost: $541.1 billion. unadjusted for inflation
"We Win" = 48 bits of ASCII code. Each Bit = 11.27$ billion dollars. Rough adjustment for Australia,NZ,Britain,Canada,etc = 13.45 billion dollars/bit unadjusted for inflation
Not taking into account casulties, thousands of other unknown/unquantifiable factors.
Sources:
A war to be Won - Murray and Millet
The World At Arms - Reader's Digest (publisher
Us Gov't GDP - IRS website
Yep. This is the answer.
Nike
Coke
McDonalds
You could burn every single physical asset of these companies. Kill all the staff. And you would still only have dented the market value of the company - these companies are brand led. (ISBN 0-00-653040-0 for lots of juice).
It's the word 'NIKE' and the tick logo that ALL the value resides in - because people associate THOSE with the Nike values. You don't need the big marketing plan, brand bible etc... for that - all of those can be reworked. Whats of value is the existing brand loyalty and awareness.