One way (maybe the only way) Yahoo can succeed

marissamayerAlibaba’s IPO has come and gone and with it Yahoo has lost the role of Alibaba proxy and its shares have begun to slide. Yahoo’s Wall Street honeymoon, if there ever was one, is over, leaving the company trying almost anything it can to avoid sliding into oblivion. Having covered Yahoo continuously since its founding 20 years ago it is clear Y! has little chance of managing its way out of this latest of many crises despite all the associated cash. But — if it will — Yahoo could invest its way to even greater success.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, thinking like Type A CEOs nearly always seem to think, wants to take some of the […]

By |September 30th, 2014|2014, Business, Companies, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Industry, Internet, strategy, Technology, Venture Capital|52 Comments
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Apple proves that moats are for dummies

moatAs we all know, Apple last week announced two new iPhones, a payment service (ApplePay), and a line of Apple Watches that require iPhones to work. There’s not much I can say about these products that you can’t read somewhere else. They are bigger and better than what preceded them and — in the case of ApplePay and the AppleWatch — just different. They are all topnotch products that will stand out in the market and have good chances of being successful. So instead of writing about products we already know about, I’d like to write about moats to protect products from competition.

Moats, as you know, are defensive fortifications typically built to surround castles, making them […]

By |September 15th, 2014|2014, Business, Companies, competition, Industry, Product Development, strategy, Technology|65 Comments
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The Fed suckered IBM into a failing cloud strategy?

Ginni_RomettyEconomist David Stockman, who is probably best known for being President Reagan’s budget director back in the era of voodoo economics, has been particularly outspoken about IBM as a poster child for bad policy on the part of the U.S. Federal Reserve. How this would be isn’t immediately obvious but I think is worth exploring because IBM is far from the only company so afflicted. There’s an important effect here to be understood about corporate motivations and their consequences.

So I’ll begin with a story. Almost 40 years ago there was a study I worked on at Stanford’s Institute for Communication Research having to do with helping farmers in Kentucky be […]

By |July 25th, 2014|2014, Business, cloud computing, Companies, Economy, Finance, Government, Industry|63 Comments
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IBM back in the USSR?

backintheUSSRMy book, The Decline and Fall of IBM, is now available in paperback, on the iPad and Nook, as well as on the Kindle. A dozen other platforms plus an audio book will be available shortly, but these are the big ones.

Over the weekend I received a very insightful message about the book from reader Steve Jenkins in Australia, where IBM is showing the same behavior problems as everywhere else. Steve has an insight into Big Blue that I wish I had thought to include in the book because I believe he is absolutely correct.

“Finished your e-book, but skimmed the blog comments,” wrote […]

By |June 15th, 2014|2014, Books, Business, Companies, history, Industry, Predictions, Technology|66 Comments
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The Decline and Fall of IBM

Cringely_eBook-cover_1563x2500Well my IBM eBook is finally available. Right now that’s just on Amazon.com for the Kindle (just click the link to the right) but by next week it will be on every eBook platform (iPad Nook, etc.) and there will be a trade paperback as well as an audio edition. I’ll announce all of those here as they appear. 

I feel I owe an explanation for the long delay in publishing this book. I finished it in early January, about a week after my mother died, only to learn that my old-school book publisher didn’t want to touch it. Or more properly they wanted […]

By |June 4th, 2014|2014, Books, Breaking News, Business, Companies, Computing, Finance, Industry, Outsourcing|229 Comments
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