You have to admire the grandness of claims sometimes made by pundits. Derek Thompson’s assessment comes down to this: Apple’s core business is something that practically everybody wants to do (and can do): making phones and tablets. Amazon’s core business is something that practically nobody wants to do (or can do): build a massive online [...]
Back in 2007 a member of the press asked Steve Jobs about Apple’s participation, or lack thereof, in the Intel Inside program. Both Jobs and Phil Schiller make it clear that they want the customer’s experience to be focused on what the product delivers, not who the makers of its components are. That’s important for [...]
The Washington Post has a three-part series chronicling a recent workshop in Menlo Park, California focused on finding ways to save independent bookstores. Day 3 is here, with links to the previous two days. The threat? Amazon. Oh, Amazon, I don’t know how to feel about you anymore. Life on the South Coast would be, [...]
CNet has a fantastic history of “Netflix’s lost year” in which they pair all the external happenings that all of us could observe with internal events. If the article seems too long to read: the conclusion is Netflix over-reached in its transition. Streaming video is the future, but there was no reason to cannibalize the [...]
Signal vs. Noise has an ongoing series entitled “Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Proud.” Last spring they profiled Braintree and its founder Bryan Johnson. It’s a great story about a guy who, while not particularly interested in payment processing, is interested in setting up and running a good company. Johnson’s particular moment arrived when he realized he [...]
It’s all fun and games until daddy learns his daughter is pregnant.
The Forbes reviewer mentioned previously is Steve Denning, who is “the author of six business books and consultant to organizations around the world on leadership, innovation, management and business narrative.” Business narrative?
It’s not that I am particularly interested in tracking Amazon’s bad behavior, but as a consumer who has become somewhat invested in their infrastructure, I do like to know all I can about the folks with whom I do business. Ethics matter. In this particular case, according to the lawsuit, Amazon raised its percentage of [...]
Amazon is in the news again, and again for all the wrong reasons. Is it really so hard for a corporation to imagine that people will subscribe to your business model if it offers reasonable prices while you engage in reasonable practices? That’s why I shop at Amazon. I don’t need the cheapest prices because [...]
Regular readers know that I am not only a fan of Amazon.com, but also a subscriber to its Prime feature. I think the company has made most of the right moves, except its digital content offerings, especially video, seem stuck in some older, uglier version of the web where a lot of the functionality you [...]
Build Your Own Platform (Really “brand” describes what Hyatt is after perhaps better than platform, but his article is focused on the IT infrastructure that one uses to build a “brand” — or franchise or whatever.)
Can creativity be taught? [Forbes]
Somewhere deep inside Microsoft, someone gets it: if you let them hack it, they will come. I love this video not only for the openness that a large corporation displays in primely showing people using their gear in ways they did not imagine to what people can imagine to the lovely soundtrack that accompanies it:
A recent article in Entrepreneur magazine reminded me of my own days as a business consultant, but what really struck me was how much it sounded exactly like the kind of activities that academic faculty already engage in or are being asked to engage in: Are you an expert? If so, you might be able [...]
This Chronicle post reports on a meeting where business schools continue to re-think the content of their curricula in the wake of the financial crisis. As I have noted elsewhere, the MBA is already under some scrutiny for its role in offshoring (aka outsourcing) so much of our productivity. (I am suddenly reminded of the [...]