27 January 2010
Up in the Air is a rather good movie that’s been hailed as a great piece of social commentary, but the picture it paints of the business world is a fantasy. George Clooney and Vera Farmiga are terrific, especially together; the clips of real people, devastated at losing their jobs, are moving; and [...]
Business Strategy
20 January 2010
Google’s announcement that it is no longer prepared to cooperate with the Chinese authorities in ‘filtering’ search results and may pull out of the country altogether is proof positive for the faithful of just how different a company it is. The fact that there were probably business considerations behind the decision as well [...]
11 January 2010
This post was to have been about Google’s vaulting ambitions and its supposed similarities to Microsoft, but John Gapper’s latest piece in the FT and Chris Dixon’s blog made me think again. While I agree with almost all of Gapper’s observations on open systems and much of what Dixon says, I have reservations [...]
24 December 2009
The suggestion that there is an entrepreneurial gene –
that entrepreneurs are born not made, raises interesting questions about what we mean by entrepreneurialism. There are many facets to it and entrepreneurs come in many different forms. Some of the most successful ones do not correspond with the stereotypes of a relish for [...]
17 December 2009
My last post dwelt on two particularly disastrous mergers. These are not of course typical, but the short answer must surely be yes: mergers and acquisitions are nearly always dangerous, since the outcome is always uncertain and the risks enormous. Most result in much poorer performance than was promised at the time, but [...]
11 December 2009
There’s an intriguing symmetry between two announcements this month. Comcast, the cable company, has acquired 51% of NBC Universal, and Time Warner has finally managed to sell off AOL, with which it so disastrously merged nine years ago. The latest deal may not challenge the earlier one for the title of most catastrophic [...]
21 November 2009
The news that Dell has been pushed from second to third position in the PC market is a reminder of how short are the reigns of most industry leaders – in the first half of this decade it was number one and undisputed heavyweight champion. This industry of course has always been ferociously [...]
15 November 2009
The sharpest comments I’ve seen on Rupert Murdoch’s latest pronouncement were from Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing and John Gapper in the Financial Times. (In an interview, which is available on BoingBoing, Murdoch said that he planned to charge for the content on News Corp web sites, and that he might even bar access [...]
