Archive for On Strategy
Facebook: An Annus Horribilis
Editor’s Note: This post first appeared in the Epilogues tab as the conclusion to The Curse of the Walled Garden – Facebook’s Inevitable Implosion Begins. To understand the complete context of the events mentioned here you might want to review that post in its entirety. So, in the interests of wrapping things up, if you […]
AI: Crossing the Chasm One Clock Radio at a Time
Things set in motion acquire inertia and with luck inertia acquires purpose and with purpose accomplishments follow. At least that’s the theory. I was reminded of this the other day while reconfiguring the settings and linkage from Alexa and my smart home hub for the umpteenth time. This usually happens after a change of seasons, […]
A Perfect Storm?
Is the age of the too big to bust techno-trust about to come to and end? Have political, economic, sovereign and consumer butterflies created a techno-bombogenesis of dynasty ending proportions? Have the monopoly making network effects of multisided platform flywheels finally reached their asymptotic limit? Will the simple humility of sound business practices, fidelity to […]
Privacy, Blockchains and Balkanization: The Rise of Custody and The End of Adtech as We Know it
What is bigger than Y2K, more expensive than an Oracle upgrade and sneakier than a Sasser worm on a vintage Windows PC? That’s right. GDPR. GDPR may sound a little bit like a German political faction and, in fact, German political factions may have helped get it started but the cold truth is the letters […]
AI: “What’s reality but a collective hunch?”
In case you’ve missed it, MIT Technology Review has been doing a spectacular and somewhat sobering series on the current state of Artificial Intelligence, which I believe they plan to culminate in a dedicated year-end issue. And not a moment too soon. You know things have gotten out of hand when to say that the […]
Greed Is Good….
Could VC’s twist from their own petard? The first time I saw a venture capitalist was in 1974. Florsheim shoes, Brooks Brothers suit, school tie, horn-rimmed, tortoise shell glasses and according to my sources a pedigree that read like the marketing brochure from a trendy Cambridge sperm-bank: yada yada Harvard, yada yada Stanford, yada yada […]
Innovation: Power Laws, the Adjacent Possible and the Accumulation of Continuity
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose You can do some really nifty things with math. For instance, were you aware that winning the lottery is not as hard as everyone makes it out to be? If you start with a universe of say 36 or 42 or 56 possible numbers you don’t have […]
HPE Builds a Boat in its Basement
But will it still float if they ever get it out? Recently, Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) has been losing ballast like a leaky freighter in a raging storm. Coming off the much anticipated separation of HP into HP and HPE there have been a number of additional strategic transactions executed by HPE including the sale […]
Platform Strategies in the Age of AI
In case you missed it, platforms are now the rage in technology strategy. To be current means that you need to be developing a platform to capture multisided markets of producers and consumers to exploit and capture network effects that ordinary pedestrian business models cannot hope to attain. And, unbeknownst to all but a few […]
Facebook: The Cadillac of Social Media?
Honey, I just wonder what you do there in the back… Leaving the Pew polls aside for a moment when I close my eyes I imagine the typical Facebook user to be increasingly female, white, high-school educated, and of lower middle class income. They are also increasingly empty nesters whose preferred vacation venue is a […]