Mamas don't let your babies grow up to see trade shows
Richard Alley, a geoscience professor at Penn State, drilled into the Antarctic a few years ago removing a half-mile ice core documenting the last Ice Age, which Alley determined had lasted 10,000 years then came to an abrupt end in only three years. That may seem an odd analogy for this week’s Consumer Electronics Show but it’s what came to mind when I saw story after story suggesting CES, too, might be winding down. I think it is. And I further think that maybe the only thing that might yet save CES in some form is Willie Nelson, or maybe Taylor Swift.
Huh?
CES never used to matter much in my world. The show to attend was […]
When I started this gig in September, 1987 Ronald Reagan was President, there was no commercial Internet, Oprah had been on the air for less than a year, and a fairly powerful PC was an IBM PC AT running at 8 MHz. In September that will have been 25 years and I think 25 years is probably enough.
Steve Ballmer has always been nice to me. I can’t say we have much of a relationship, but the half dozen times I have interviewed him have always gone well and he tries to please, which I appreciate. But (there’s always a but, isn’t there?) Ballmer has failed at Microsoft and I believe 2012 will see him replaced as Redmond’s CEO.
Let me be clear about this just in case my clever headline makes no sense: I think the Yahoo board punted by hiring Scott Thompson, who is either a stooge for Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang or a convenient placeholder until the company can be sold.
Companies go public for many reasons but the two that are most common are: 1) to raise capital for further expansion, and; 2) to secure the wealth of the founders. Some companies go public for different reasons, like Microsoft’s IPO back in 1986 that was literally forced by excessive secondary trading of company shares. Gates and Shirley decided to accept the burden of going public because it wasn’t all bad, but they didn’t seek it because they didn’t need the money.