A longtime reader checked-in today with one more story of Internet generational change. We used to call it just disintermediation, but in its later stages this syndrome requires new consumers who may have never even visited a bookstore… or had to.
“The family went to Borders today to look for a book or two. The store is closing. I always liked that store on the Middle River in Fort Lauderdale; watching the boats go by as I read the paper. Anyway we went, the lines were long in checkout, and the discounts were 20 to 40 percent. So I went to IT to wander around, found a few books, figured the 20-40 percent off scanned the […]
President Obama last night had dinner at John Doerr’s house in Silicon Valley and for some reason I wasn’t invited. I wish I had been. Can you imagine Obama making small talk with Steve Jobs? This is an instance where Steve’s lack of an internal censor probably served the event well, or at least I hope it did, because when it comes to the dinner’s goal of stimulating innovation in America every Administration from any political party needs all the help it can get. I should know, because I’ve been working a bit with those White House would-be innovators, trying to get them in the right groove.
Maybe it was that column I wrote recently about AOL buying the Huffington Post, but I swear AOL has turned on me. Share my pain.
When John Sculley forced Steve Jobs out of Apple back in 1985, the former PepsiCo marketing executive very quickly produced dramatic improvements in Apple’s profitability. Apple wasn’t losing money before, but Sculley improved the bottom line by about $200 million (a lot in those days) simply by cutting all of Steve Jobs’s pet projects that appeared to have poor prospects. Sculley raised profits by cutting expenses not by increasing sales. Expect the same thing at Nokia where, ignoring for the moment the “enormous payments” Microsoft will be making according to Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, the company can probably cut its software development budget to near-zero, saving $1 billion or more and increasing profits by that […]
Nokia today announced that the Finnish cellphone company is choosing Windows 7 Phone as the operating system for its future smart phones. It’s not a surprising move given that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop came from Microsoft and it’s not even that risky a move given that the alternative was a slow but certain death for Nokia smart phones running Symbian and Meego. Sure Nokia could have gone with Android, but Google has less at risk than Microsoft so Redmond had much more to offer. The only real question here is whether Nokia can make the new strategy a success? I think they can, but there is only one way to do it — by rushing […]