Technorati Tags: strategy,design,competition
As far as I can tell Yahoo! did a lease/sale deal with Microsoft, thereby exiting the growing online search business to focus on the fragmented, super-competitive, online media business because Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and her advisors said they could not marshal the capital to fight against the billions in R&D that Microsoft [...]
David Reed, one of our Diamond Fellows and one of the people who invented the basic information protocols of the internet (TCP/IP), has got a new take on future of our technology ecosystem. His MIT thesis in the 1970s predicted that the dominant network structure would be a “dumb network” with “smart ends” – and [...]
This post was coauthored by Chris Curran and Howard Rubin. Also posted at Harvard Business Review
Dr. John Gray’s book, Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus, which has sold over forty million copies, argues that the two sexes speak different languages. The good doctor even includes his Martian-to-Venusian phrase dictionary as a support to [...]
Dr. Robert Ballard and his team have used robots to explore the mid-Atlantic ridge where our earth births her new "skin" by oozing out lava more than15,000 feet below the sea’s surface — an environment of 300 degree Celsius sea water, full of metals and toxic acids. The team expected to find no life, due [...]
The four fundamental principles of the agile, "edge-based" organization are situational awareness, skills, values, and decision rights.
For instance, special forces teams are able to deal effectively with the most complex and dynamic situations because they have been designed to be able to be extremely agile. In other words, these troops are able to dynamically [...]
Google tapped into an existing set of mental relationships to make their model work. Think of Andy Warhol; Andy worked with Campbell Soup Cans and Marilyn Monroe. Google did similar work with page links. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is comparable to Avon Products — Avon, which just reported that they have 5.8 million representatives [...]
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant." — Justice Lewis Brandeis
A day before Lehman went bankrupt, they carried an A rating from Moody’s on their debt. Likewise, AIG was rated AAA only 24 hours before they begged for their first multi-billion dollar tranche of bailout cash. Worse yet, the rescue bills have not created a new way [...]
Chris Curran & John Sviokla
Duct tape is universally useful because it is incredibly simple, almost infinitely flexible, easily available, and cheap. Twitter shares all these attributes. Twitter is a new layer of communication which can be overlaid on everything – just like Duct Tape can be used to repair a chair, or make an artificial [...]
Offerpal reports itself to be the leading platform for the monetization of social networks. Their key service is the ability to give points to people who are willing to participate in research or advertising. The participants then use these points to buy software, games or other bit-based goods. The developers and artists who created those [...]
Many pundits are railing about Cisco’s move into the server market because the company’s current gross margins are 10-20% less in the server market than in their core router market. What these critics miss is that the evolution of computing is to create corporate clouds of functionality and storage — and those who control the [...]
