2013

  • Open Source Apps

    I’m a bit late to the most recent flareup around app store pricing – it’s been a busy week of traveling – but it’s worth noting that the trend towards free is basically inevitable and the expected result in a functioning market. To put it another way, apps want to be free just like apples […]


  • Overstating the Consumerization of IT

    Marco Arment, in Underscore Price Dynamics: This is the real reason why Apple doesn’t care about upgrade pricing: there’s no demand from customers. The market has shown that free apps will be downloaded at least an order of magnitude more than paid-up-front apps, and smart use of in-app purchase in a free app is likely […]


  • Obsoletive

    Not all products are disruptive: some are obsoletive. They are more expensive but remove the need for entire categories of products.


  • An Interview with Eric Jackson at Forbes

    Eric Jackson recently interviewed me for his column at Forbes. I’m cross-posting here my answers to the tech industry related questions. Check out the full interview to read more about me personally and the background of stratechery. Q: Where is Apple at right now as a company in this post-Steve Jobs period? A: I think, […]


  • What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong

    Clayton Christensen continually predicts that Apple will be disrupted because his theory does not incorporate the importance of the user experience.


  • The $550 iPhone 5C Makes Perfect Sense

    I can sympathize with the inability of many folks to grok exactly what Apple is thinking with iPhone 5C pricing. I myself was confused until just before launch, when I wrote Thinking about iPhone Pricing and honed in on the idea of “good-enough.” In the case of the iPhone, the 3G was clearly better than […]


  • HTC’s – and Windows Phone’s – Missing Market

    According to Digitimes, HTC won’t use the top-of-the-line Qualcomm processor in their new phablet: HTC reportedly will adopt an old Qualcomm processor, the quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ 8064, for production of its first large-size HTC One Max to be launched in October 2013, according to sources in the supply chain. Some sources said […]


  • There Are Two Twitters; Only One is Worth Investing In

    There are two Twitters. One is for special occasions only, while I am obsessed with the other. The ultimate value of the Twitter stock (TWTR?) is fully dependent on which of these two Twitters is on offer. Twitter #1: What’s Happening? The first version of Twitter isn’t hard to find: Welcome to Twitter. Find out […]


  • Two Minutes, Fifty-six Seconds

    After endless dithering, that’s how long it took me to know the iPhone 5C would cost $549. It was at two minutes, fifty-six seconds1 that Tim Cook said there would be a video – a video! – about the iTunes Festival. And it was awesome. In case you didn’t watch the whole video (and you […]


  • Twitter Acquires MoPub

    When Yahoo Acquired Tumblr, I wrote about the Signal-to-Ads Cycle: The result is the signal-to-ads cycle: Information is gathered from first-party sites via analytics, 3rd-party sites via ads, buttons, etc, and owned-and-operated mobile apps tied to your identity (think Instagram) Highly targeted ads are served in search results, display ads, and natively, primarily on PCs […]