Marco Arment had an interesting post yesterday on whether Apple is in trouble because of the investments of others, particularly, Google, in AI. He wondered if it would be disrupted in the same way BlackBerry was but Apple itself. Amazon, Facebook, and Google — especially Google — have all invested heavily in big-data web services …
Et tu SSRN?
SSRN -- the social science paper repository -- is being acquired by Elsevier. SSRN has always been a for-profit entity and so it shouldn't be a surprise that this has happened. Put simply, there is a commercial rationale to this especially given that it is hard for smaller scale entities -- and SSRN despite its …
Why Facebook Messenger is a big deal for customer service
[This post initially appeared on HBR.org] For a long time, Facebook Messenger seemed to be secondary to Facebook’s core business – a product feature rather than something more. So when Facebook bought WhatsApp for an extraordinary $19 billion, it seemed like WhatsApp would end up being Facebook’s messaging platform of choice. But on April 14, …
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Ford hedges to deal with disruption
[This post was first published in HBR Blogs] The auto industry is facing a trio of disruptive technologies: electric batteries, autonomous vehicles, and the mobile phone. The first two have been long-standing threats, relatively speaking, and are embodied in one company, Tesla. Which is why the auto industry’s reaction to Tesla’s announcement on March 31 of …
Online Research Seminars: First Impressions
Last week, the Strategy Research Initiative organised a research seminar using Harvard Business School's HBX platform. This is the same platform HBS now use to deliver online courses. It was an interesting experience but as is usually the case with these things, it highlighted as much about what was missing as what was there. Let …
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Some thoughts on Facebook Live
[This post originally appeared in HBR Blogs] Facebook is Live. Will it get livelier? This week, Facebook rolled out its newest product, Facebook Live. Actually, “tool” is probably a better word. What it does is allow anybody to stream a video from their smartphone and have it broadcast live. The result is then stored, like …
What would it take to disrupt Facebook?
[reposted from HBR Blogs] To this day, Microsoft Office remains the dominant office software suite, a position it has held since the 1990s. While competitors have emerged to appeal to different customer niches (Google Docs with collaboration or iWork for Mac users), for many people the value of using Office lies in the fact that …
Go, AI and Game Theory
I haven't played Go but have been reading about it over the last little while since it turned out that an AI learned to beat the world champion in it. The significance of this is that those who knew the game of Go believed that it was out of a machine's reach to learn to …
Do founders insure against disruption?
I listened to a very interesting a16z podcast on disruption that involved a conversation with Clay Christensen and Marc Andreessen. They cover lots of topics but the part that interested me was when Andreessen was talking about what he perceived to be a fast disruptive cycle in Silicon Valley. (I am not so sure about …
Digitization and the Rise of Trump
An interesting thesis has emerged about the rise of Donald Trump and it comes from Clay Shirky. For fun, he tweeted an entire essay about the subject and you can read those here. His argument is simple. Rather than the two parties deciding who will be their presidential nominee, the Internet and social media have …
Digitopoly 