My grandfather wrote a book called Spanish Rehearsal: An Eyewitness in Spain During the Civil War, 1936-1939. He correctly saw the Spanish Civil War as a rehearsal for a bigger war between fascism and communism that we now know as World War 2. The winner of World War 2 was democracy in a temporary alliance […]
The fundamental flaw is that sovereign writers who make it to the top of the power law can easily switch from Substack to Stripe. If you already know something about online media paywalls & data barter economics, power law & sovereign writers, Substack & Stripe, algos and attention hacking, …that is your TLDR summary. If […]
I love free market competition, but something about Uber makes me queasy. It is not the bare knuckles competition against Lyft. That is just how the game is played. Asking Uber to be more gentle on Lyft would be like the prop in a rugby scrum being told he should be gentle on his opposite […]
The fridge alerting the grocery store that my milk is low or old does not excite me, but if somebody figured out a service to manage those now overly complex light bulbs, I would be a “customer-in-waiting” and I suspect there would be others like me. Warning, curmudgeon alert. Do you remember when light bulbs […]
Mobile is clearly a big disruptive force in technology, but what markets will it disrupt and how? Although most of us already have smartphones (in the West), a lot of what we do on those smartphones, such as surfing and email, is like talking heads on early TV. What are the mobile-native use cases that […]
Software is eating the world….one bite at the time. Are you Softzilla or are you Softzilla’s lunch? The first bite was the media business. I was there when it happened. It hurt. Softzilla (my shorthand for software, digitization, mobile, big data, etc etc) first bit into the print business. At the time I was running […]
I promise to keep this brief, it’s just an out take from another post I am working on. I have stopped seeing pitches for Big Data. They are now pitches for Data Science. Ho, hum, what’s the game? I think it is simply the realization that the “Big Data” roller-coaster is careening down towards the […]
Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp put the spotlight on the competition that OTT (Over The Top) ventures pose to Telecom carriers. Consumers love WhatsApp pricing at $1 a year and have no love for Goliath Telecom carriers, so we tend to cheer for upstart David vs Telecom Goliath. However, some Telecom operators have been […]
Corporate StrategyEnterprise SalesSAASstart-upsStrategy Workshopb2b2ccrossing the chasmrevenue sharing partnerships
Historically, the objective of enterprise software was to make employees more efficient by automating tasks. The software industry moved from cutting G&A costs to making people at the front line more efficient through software such as CRM, Marketing Automation, Business Process Management and Collaboration. In all cases, the business model was licensing. The licensing model […]
capital marketsFintechGlobalizationIndiabitcoinblockchainglobalizationM-Pesamarc andreessen
This is one of a series called Explorations down the BItcoin rabbit hole. The Blockchain is exciting because The Perfect Copy Machine has its flaws. Let me unpick that, starting with an anecdote. In 1992, somebody showed me the Internet (thanks Charles Rawls). I ignored him. Silly me! The reason I ignored it was that […]
