Incentives
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Two Microsofts
My well-chronicled frustration with Microsoft’s corporate strategy comes down to one point: I don’t think any company should have both horizontal (i.e. services) and vertical (i.e. devices) businesses. It creates conflicting incentives: a horizontal business should be great on every platform, while a vertical business should be differentiated. Thus, I was quite pleased when Satya Nadella’s…
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Daily Update: Apple’s Seattle Office, The Imminent Demise of Radio, CNET Launches a Magazine
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Daily Update: Tim Cook’s Announcement; Twitter Changes, Again; Nintendo’s Turnaround
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Daily Update: A Tale of Three Smartphone Makers, Microsoft Health and the Microsoft Band
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Daily Update: Why Apple Pay was Blocked, and Why it Will Succeed; Google Reorgs, Kind Of
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Daily Update: Microsoft Earnings and Surface’s Alleged Success, Amazon Earnings and the Fire Fantasy, The End of the Apple-GT Advanced Saga
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Peak Google
Despite the hype about disruption, the truth is most tech giants, particularly platform providers, are not so much displaced as they are eclipsed. IBM, for example, has been successfully selling and servicing mainframes for going on 50 years (although they are now in serious trouble (members-only)). During the PC era, though, they were eclipsed by Microsoft.…