Most software companies fall short of perfection, and that’s just the way it goes. It’s routine for most software firms to slap beta on the product and ship. Most companies aren’t Apple, however. In case you missed it (and if you did, where have you been?), Apple released imperfect mapping software for the latest iPhone. …
The Prevailing View
Talk to the management at leading technology firms in the same market, and the similarities in opinions are striking. Most hold roughly the same set of opinions, beliefs, and ideas about how specific actions lead to successful business outcomes. For lack of a better phrase, I call this the “prevailing view.” The prevailing view is …
Does Google get a good ROI in KC?
What in the world is Google doing with its high speed network in Kansas City? Does Goggle expect the revenue to exceed the costs of building the network? Dave Burstein has some numbers to illuminate the question. Dave Burstein is a communications junky for the major communications junky. He covers many topics in communications markets, …
Calm Economics
Calm economics is a flavor of economics that prizes insight developed under the auspices of calm deliberation. Many participants in tech markets today digest calm economics daily. They know it when they see it in the Wall Street analysis, or during investor meetings, like the ones Warren Buffet conducts. Look, I call this “calm economics” …
A Big Payoff
Google and Apple are two of the most profitable companies on the globe today. They seem to share little in common except that achievement. They took very different paths to the stratosphere. Google, after all, is less than a decade and a half old, a child of the web with a successful approach to advertising, …
The mouse on the manhole cover
[This post was originally published on HBR.org on March 26th, 2012] I recently returned from a family vacation to Walt Disney World in Florida. There, my son noticed the manhole cover. Right in the center is Mickey Mouse. On the manhole cover! Although my son noticed it, not everyone does. And that's the point. Manhole …
Data-driven Decision-making
Information technology has created a data explosion. We now record virtually every click of every visitor to every website, every search on Google or Bing, every transaction at every cash register, every call or text on cellphones, every inventory change in our supply chains and petabytes of other data on what we buy, sell, or …
Kindle-ing Competition
We don’t think of the Kindle Fire as a tablet. We think of it as a service. – Jeff Bezos The analysts predicted that Amazon would introduce its new Kindle Fire tablet today with an aggressive low price of $250 to $300, in line with low margin competitors like Samsung. They were wrong. Amazon priced …
The Dismal Economics of Moneyball
Moneyball is a huge hit, which doesn't happen too often to movies featuring an economics major who's good at statistics. It tells the true story of how the Oakland A's became a competitive team despite having a payroll less than 1/3 of the Yankees. They did it by using statistical techniques pioneered by sabermetrician Bill …
Puzzling over Big Wireless Carrier Mergers: An Editorial
Let’s talk about AT&T proposal to merge with T-Mobile. Why do the parties involved still consider this merger viable? Executives at AT&T seemed to think this merger was a good idea many months ago. For all I know, that might have been the right conclusion with the information they had then. But that was then, …
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