Soylent Green — Now Made with More Women!

Soylent_greenSoylent Green is the punchline of a bad joke told to me at the breakfast table by Channing, my 13 year-old son, but in a way it is fitting for this column about women executives in danger of being chewed-up by their corporate machines. And kudos to you if you caught the reference to Edward G. Robinson’s final film — about an over-populated world where people are recycled into cookies.

First up is Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, whom I’m told is rapidly losing the support of her hand-picked board. Mayer, who is expecting twins, will probably not be returning from her upcoming maternity leave and Wall Street has begun speculating about possible successors. […]

By |November 30th, 2015|2015, cloud computing, Companies, competition, Industry, strategy, Technology|76 Comments
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Amazon’s cloud monopoly

GartnerCloudEarlier this year two different research reports came out describing the overall cloud computing market and Amazon’s role in it. Synergy Research Group saw Amazon as by far the biggest player (bigger in fact than the next four companies combined) with about 30 percent market share. But Gartner, taking perhaps a more focussed view of just the public cloud, claimed Amazon holds 82 percent of the market with cloud capacity that’s 10 times greater than all the other public cloud providers combined. I wonder how these disparate views can be possible describing the same company? And I wonder, further, whether this means Amazon actually has a cloud monopoly?


Yup, it’s a monopoly.

By |November 2nd, 2015|2015, cloud computing, Companies, competition, Internet, law, strategy|80 Comments
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Why Yahoo is worth less than nothing


marissamayerA reader pointed out to me today that Yahoo, minus its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes plus cash, is now worth less than nothing according to Wall Street. This says a lot about Yahoo but even more about Wall Street, since the core company is still profitable if in decline. If I were a trader (I’m not) that would argue Yahoo is a buy since there’s likely to be a future point at which the company will be free of those other riches and even Wall Street will be forced to give the carcass a positive value.

But when I heard about the negative value story the first thing […]

By |October 21st, 2015|2015, Companies, Entrepreneurship, Industry, Internet, Media, strategy, Venture Capital|58 Comments
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It’s Michael Dell versus the world and Dell will win

In my last column I wrote that Dell buying EMC is a great idea (for Dell) and left it to this column to more fully explain why that is so. It takes two columns because there is so much going on here in terms of both business models and technologies. As the title suggests it comes down to Michael Dell against the world and in this case I predict Dell will win, Cisco, HP and IBM will lose, Apple will be relatively unaffected and I don’t really know what it will mean for Microsoft but I think the advantage still lies with Dell.

One thing that is key is every one of these companies except Dell is publicly traded […]

By |October 14th, 2015|2015, Business, cloud computing, Companies, competition, mobile technology, Software, strategy|68 Comments
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Dell buys EMC and gets the corporate cloud for free

emccloudThe Wall $treet Journal carried a story last week about Dell Computer possibly buying EMC, the big storage vendor, and this morning the New York Times confirmed it, pinning a price of $65 billion on the deal. There’s a lot to wonder about in this combination, which I think is pretty brilliant on Dell’s part even if I’m not generally in favor of mega-mergers. But it seems to me most of the experts commenting on the deal have it ass-backwards as Wall Street once again proves it doesn’t really understand technology business.

EMC has this large but aging storage division and a valuable subsidiary in VMware, of which EMC owns 80 percent. Activist investors […]

By |October 12th, 2015|2015, Business, cloud computing, Companies, Industry|30 Comments
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