Daily Update: Facebook’s Messenger Announcement, Other F8 Announcements, Apps Matter (and Facebook Knows It)

Good morning, More Facebook today, but in a decidedly different arena – developers. On to the update: Facebook’s Messenger Announcement From Bloomberg: Facebook Inc. is opening up its Messenger chat application so that other software developers can add new features that will let people include photos, videos and other enhancements to their online conversations. TheSubscribe […]

Daily Update: FiftyThree and the App Store, Three Notes on China

Good morning, Surprise! Today’s update is not late. It’s also not my weekly article, as planned – that should be coming tomorrow. In addition, I’ll be off for Chinese New Year on Thursday and Friday. On to the update: FiftyThree and the App Store FiftyThree, a startup based in New York, is particularly important toSubscribe […]

Daily Update: Microsoft’s Windows 10 Event (and Project HoloLens)

Good morning, Today’s update is all about Microsoft’s myriad of announcements yesterday. I think it makes the most sense to think of the event, billed as being about Windows 10, in three parts: Part 1 was the overview of Windows 10, including the vision underlying the operating system, demos of specific functionality, as well asSubscribe […]

Daily Update: It’s Great to be Small, Niche Business Models, YouTube Seeking to Retain Stars

Good morning, I received multiple reports that Friday’s Daily Update was marked as containing phishing links. I can absolutely confirm this is not the case, so if you missed it, please take a look in your spam folder. For the third Monday in a row I’m writing about media – Media Mondays if you will.Subscribe […]

Daily Update: The Twitter Mismatch; Microsoft Cuts the Xbox Price, Again; The Office Platform

Good morning, Let’s get to it – on to the update: The Twitter Mismatch Twitter reported its third-quarter results yesterday. From the Wall Street Journal: One year after its initial public offering, Twitter Inc. is still having a hard time convincing investors to look beyond one touchy metric: user growth. The social-media company reported MondaySubscribe […]

The Diminished iPad

Something very strange is happening this week: there is an Apple event, and very few people – including myself – are particularly jazzed up about it. Oh sure, I’ll watch it, and I hope I’m surprised, but there is very little in the rumor mill – a retina iMac, OS X Yosemite, and the iPad […]

Microsoft’s Good (and Potentially Great) Minecraft Acquisition

It’s difficult to overstate what a big deal Minecraft is. It’s the third best-selling game of all time behind Tetris and Wii Sports, and unlike the latter especially, it is a remarkably sticky experience: the vast majority of customers (over 90 percent on PC, according to Microsoft) sign in every single month. Were Microsoft to […]

Daily Update: How Tim Cook Should Have Introduced Watch, Apple Pay and the Apple Watch, Microsoft to Buy Minecraft?

Good morning, I wrote about the Apple Watch introduction on Stratechery in a piece called Apple Watch: Asking Why and Saying No. In short, while I like everything hardware-related about the watch, I was very concerned with both the keynote messaging and the software. Moreover, I think those two concerns are interrelated: the need theSubscribe […]