Daily Update: Microsoft’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

Good morning, I am on vacation this week, so instead of Daily Updates based on the news of the past few days, I am doing Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) analysis’ of five of the most important companies in tech: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. These analysis’ are not meant to be comprehensive – I’m going toSubscribe […]

Daily Update: Google I/O – Analysis on Every Announcement

Good morning, It’s the day after the Google I/O keynote, and I believe the actual presentation has concluded but I really should check to make sure… In all seriousness, this year’s presentation was actually shorter than last year’s, but no less ambitious. Like I did after WWDC, I’m going to spend this update running throughSubscribe […]

Daily Update: Amazon’s PR Runup, Box Acquires Streem, Priceline Acquires OpenTable

Good morning, Two acquisitions and anticipation for a big announcement – there’s always something interesting in tech! On to the update: Amazon’s Press Release Runup Amazon is doing something interesting in the runup to tomorrow’s announcement, which most expect to be a Kindle smartphone: they are effectively pre-announcing multiple features that will likely be sellingSubscribe […]

Growing Apple at WWDC

In the end, as with many of Apple strategies, much of what transpired in Monday’s WWDC keynote was telegraphed many months ago, at least from a strategic perspective. Consider the thinking behind iOS 7. As Jony Ive told USA Today: When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people […]

Daily Update: WWDC Overview

Good morning, I apologize that today’s update is so late; I have been on a fruitless search for Wifi most of the morning after realizing T-Mobile unilaterally disabled my phone’s ability to tether. Fun! But enough about me – on to the update: WWDC As expected there were no hardware announcements, which actually made theSubscribe […]

Daily Update: Lenovo Earnings, Windows 8 Banned, Google Buys Divide

Good morning, Only 49% of you opened yesterday’s email (it’s usually 80%+); I heard from several folks on Twitter that it got sent to spam, likely because of GroupOn, so please take a look and mark it as “not-spam” if that is the case. I’ll be writing about the Microsoft Surface announcements on Stratechery laterSubscribe […]

Microsoft Cloud Announcement, Cordova and Windows RT, Xbox Silliness

Good morning, I went deep on Apple’s (alleged) acquisition of Beats, yet in some ways, I’m not sure I went deep enough. One thing I was trying to capture is that there is a very benign explanation for this acquisition: Beats solves a lot of problems for Apple. And maybe that’s all it is. Still,Subscribe […]

The Heart of Dropbox

Last Thursday, after waking up to the news of Dropbox’s most recent announcements,1 I couldn’t have been less impressed. To quote myself from a chat I had with a friend: “Dropbox is an unfocused mess.” But then I actually watched the event. I’ve long been a believer in cloud storage; back in college I experimented […]

Box, Microsoft, and the Next Enterprise Platform

Let’s get one thing out of the way: there is nothing about Box’s S-1 filing that suggests tech is in a bubble. Indeed, the fact Aaron Levie and company are not yet profitable is a good thing. To understand why, you must read Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not by VC Mark Suster: There […]