Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Amazon does online application hosting. So does Alibaba.
Silicon Valley tends to fall in love with the new new thing.
Amazon led with online bookselling, web services, and drones.
Apple is so secretive internally, they keep secrets from each other.
Sony's Walkman far predated the iPod. Nokia ruled smartphones before Apple.
Facebook can spend and talk endlessly to defend itself so long as it keeps printing money.
The creation of the 'Goldie Scholars' program is an acknowledgment that knowledge isn't enough.
Cannibalization is by far the most difficult feat any established, successful company can pull off.
Groceries, TV shows, and shoes are a few categories Amazon has been willing to hang onto for years.
I've written repeatedly about the quest by corporations everywhere to transform themselves digitally.
The cloud, for a while more of a metaphor than a giant business, is re-ordering all sorts of industries.
I stopped using AIM years ago - I can't remember exactly when - and so its demise shouldn't mean much to me.
If one's man's trash is another man's treasure, then one industry's potential failure is another's opportunity.
Uber has a lot of money, and they've hired a lot of good people, and they have the capacity to professionalize.
As the finish line for 2017 begins to come into focus, I'm beginning to wonder what an Uber turnaround would look like.
No matter your interpretation of Apple's success with its Watch, it has become a leader - and it wasn't first to market.
As a new Googler, Porat spent some time learning the words that describe the Googley people who work in those buildings.
Porat is among a handful of top people who work for both Alphabet and Google. As such, there's a regular cadence to her week.
Chip maker Nvidia is the new old thing, an overnight success story years in the making that is having its moment and then some.
A 'free and open' Internet has been an article of faith in and around Mountain View, Menlo Park, and its environs for two decades.
The reliable way great conglomerates grew over time was by adding new products and buying new companies. IBM moved from mainframe to PCs.
ICG wasn't an index fund so much as a collection of venture-capital investments focused on so-called business-to-business Internet companies.
Chinese companies, in their well-capitalized, rapidly growing, and surprisingly lightly regulated markets, have become global innovation leaders.
As China's retailing champion, Alibaba makes Amazon look like a company that carefully picks its spots. Sure, Amazon does e-tailing. So does Alibaba.
The iPod was once so important to Apple that the estimable journalist Steven Levy wrote an entire book about it. And then, poof! The iPod was nearly gone.
Amazon has a good record with customers, who are confident the retailer will give them the lowest price. Entering their home will be another thing altogether.
I confess that, like public figures from bygone days or an entertainer that hadn't been heard from in eons, I didn't know AIM, as we all called it, still existed at all.
Innovation, like creativity, is an amorphous concept. It's the holy grail of business, but achieving it - even merely explaining it - is lightning-in-a-bottle difficult.
Salesforce acquires companies - it has snapped up 55 since 2006 - that are either more innovative or that have pioneered market segments that Salesforce hasn't yet cracked.
Roku collects money two ways: by selling hardware, which it calls 'players'; and by selling advertising and taking a cut of revenues from the video publishers on its platform.
Innovation has its limits, of course, and Salesforce has proved adept at supplementing its growth with acquisitions, a tool long available to older rivals like Oracle and SAP.
Broadcom is the descendent of a nearly 60-year-old unit of the original Hewlett-Packard. Semiconductor companies are like enterprise software companies: they don't die easily.
Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente, sees technology as an augmentation to current healing tools - but not a replacement for human kindness, an integral part of healthcare.
Neither a success nor by any means a failure, Roku will nevertheless ask public investors for money because they, too, have a right to dream that magic will become reality one day.
Before its immature ways caught up with it, Uber got bigger and went further than Webvan ever did. But it bleeds money, courts controversy, and makes enemies like no company Ive ever seen.
ICG became a dot-com joke, a one-stock example of extreme hubris on the part of its management and the investment bankers and sell-side analysts who embarrassed themselves by pumping it up.
One of the world's most successful and yet mysterious companies in the world, Samsung Electronics, has been operating without its leader for months and likely will continue to do so for some time to come.
Americans fear losing control if they're forced to ride in autonomous vehicles. These same Americans fly in airplanes every day that largely are flown by computers, and impressively efficient ones at that.
Should Ford succeed in equipping all its cars with information that gets communicated back to its servers, it will become a 'big data' company, a beyond-vehicles opportunity that is as promising as it is murky.
With innovative companies and products like Tencent's WeChat messaging service and novel approaches to artificial intelligence and various business models, China rapidly is becoming an innovator in its own right.
People tend to wonder when Alibaba will enter the U.S. market. But those people are asking the wrong question. Alibaba reckons that, in 2010, China and the U.S. had an equal number of online shoppers, about 140 million.
Tesla has humiliated established carmakers with its brilliant vision. But Detroit, Turin, Stuttgart, and so on have understood scale as well as capital allocation for decades. Such gargantuan tasks could yet humiliate Tesla.
Dynamic pricing - charging more when goods and services are in high demand and short supply and less when the opposite is true - isn't new. Gasoline retailers, hoteliers, and airlines have been deploying the technique for years.
Amazon has suffered quarters-long profit droughts. Alphabet has given its investors agita over profligate spending on non-core products. Microsoft's growth - if not its profit engine - stalled for years, causing its stock to idle, too.
The rap against Tesla has always been of the 'yes, but' variety. Yes, it's a fine artisanal designer and manufacturer of electric cars, and its CEO is one of the few business leaders alive for whom the label 'visionary' isn't hyperbolic.
Global affairs consultant Ian Bremmer, founder of the Eurasia Group, has started a newsletter called 'Signal,' aimed at millennials. For years, Bremmer has written a maddeningly all-lowercase yet fascinating weekly newsletter on geopolitics.
AIM was so quaint, it organized users around 'buddy lists.' In a time before smartphones, AIM was powerful and intoxicating, a way for a generation that once had called people on the phone to communicate in quick bursts from their computers.
When I was a senior in college, I attended an inspiring conference at West Point called the Student Conference on U.S. Affairs, which paired political science majors with cadets in the hopes of building future civilian-military relationships.
If you crave further confirmation that Silicon Valley is a magical place where magical thinking reigns, consider the tale of Roku, the video streaming company that filed to go public Friday, when alert people everywhere were headed out for a long weekend.
Apple is a military-like command-and-control organization where people lower down in the organization manage up. They are constantly preparing their boss who may be preparing their boss and their boss for a presentation to the CEO or to the executive team.