Business books are an interesting genre. In another life, I would love to have participated in something like critical business studies that took its cue from critical legal studies. (Maybe this field exists?) That noted, I have to admit that I have read enough of the books in my time that I recognize the role [...]
It started off as a throwaway line by Wayne Rosso, but it’s beginning to grow into something of a meme: The latest rumor to emerge from the Google campus is that the company’s much anticipated music service is just about at the end of their rope with the major label licensing process. A source close [...]
Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster, maker of Library, has a nice post up that compares two ways of approaching the software business: farming versus mining. Essentially, farming is the old-fashioned way of building a business to last, building with the long game in mind. Mining is the new way to do business: build a business [...]
I had never heard of Lendle until they found themselves on the wrong side of Amazon’s API guidelines, but I agree completely with the assessment offered by The Economist: “The brief outage demonstrates a fundamental truth about the internet: if you don’t own the data you need to run your business, you’re dependent on the [...]
A great New Yorker essay by John Cassidy essentially arguing that people who make money by making things are better for the economy — rather than people who simply make money by making money. In this case, the two companies being compared are Apple and Goldman Sachs.
Great post by Marc Hedlund on his blog detailing the rise and fall of Wesabe. Like the Snapper story, I love these kinds of thoughtful business narratives. (There’s got to be a project in that.) I tried Mint but ultimately was uncomfortable with my financial data traversing the intarwebs. (I know, I know, it does [...]
Google’s eBooks has finally emerged from its Google Book shell: Today is the first page in a new chapter of our mission to improve access to the cultural and educational treasures we know as books. Google eBooks will be available in the U.S. from a new Google eBookstore. You can browse and search through the [...]
This article from Fast Company in 2006 about Snapper’s then CEO traveling to Bentonville, Arkansas to tell WalMart that he no longer wanted to supply them with ever cheaper lawn mowers is a classic and always worth a re-read.
Everybody’s talking about disintermediation, but, as Don Linn points out: Disintermediation is nothing new. It happens when businesses change so get used to it. Sears, Roebuck disintermediated the local dry goods store when it mailed its first catalog and it continues unabated in every sector…not just publishing and bookselling.. As Mike Cane has pointed out, [...]
It should came as no surprise, given what we know about the many tentacles of Goldman Sachs and how far they reach into the various centers of power in the U.S. as well, it seems, in Europe, that all Goldman Sachs was doing was following, or building, on the work of bastions of respectability of [...]
There’s a nice write-up over at the 37Signals blog about an iOS developer who developed an app, priced it pretty well ($25 in a market saturated with $1 apps), and has built himself a nice customer base and a comfortable living. Here’s the link.
Paul Graham’s latest essay, “Organic Startup Ideas”, is in much the same vein as a great deal of webeneur philosophy, but because it’s Graham, it’s well-written and grounded in experience.
O’Reilly Press, now O’Reilly Media, has long been a publisher of quality technical books. I own at least a dozen, and I also subscribe to Safari Books Online. And if I had more time, I would keep up with more of the O’Reilly web offerings, which feature a lot of amazing content for free. All [...]
Yeah, I had a wha? moment, too, but I came across the following information while checking out the Business Insider‘s Chart of the Day. Economists speculate that as the Chinese economy wobbles a bit — because everybody else is wobbling — a number of U.S. states/industries are more exposed to risk than others. They have [...]
This essay might have also been titled The Coming Differentiation of Trust but that seemed like a really ugly slug. The (In)Security of Apps Only on rare occasions do I wander into the territory of security, a domain I consider to be almost as complex as religious experience in America, but the recent scare on [...]