One of the most interesting things about technology strategy is that the lines of competition between different businesses is always blurry. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself this, would anyone 10 years ago have predicted that: Google and Apple would be competitors (Android and iPhone) Social networks (a category that didn’t even really exist 10 years [...]
I was reading a very insightful analysis of the supercomputing industry over the past decade on scalability.org, when I stumbled on a chart which illustrates not only a pattern I see very often, but also a reason why you should always sandbag your forecasts if you’re betting on a new technology: your forecasts are almost [...]
If you follow the technology industry gossip, you’ll have heard the rumors that Apple will release a next-generation tablet PC at the end of January (kind of like Moses bringing tablets with the word of God?) Industry gossip, especially gossip about Apple, is notoriously bad as the many analysts out there oftentimes fail to understand [...]
A few weeks ago, I puzzled over why Microsoft isn’t pursuing a more integrated device strategy across its non-PC platforms. After all, if you’re on shaky ground (new device markets), you should do everything you can to steady yourself against something more firm (like your PC business or the combination of your other devices). So, [...]
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Firefox. But, given Firefox’s slow start-time and Google’s Chrome browser’s recently announced support for extensions, I did a recent re-evaluation of my browser choice. Although I’ve chosen to stick with Firefox, the comparison of the two browsers is now much closer than its ever been before [...]
Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft’s products, you have to appreciate the brilliance of their strategic “playbook”: Use the fact that Microsoft’s operating system/productivity software is used by almost everyone to identify key customer/partner needs Build a product which is usually only a second/third-best follower product but make sure it’s tied back to Microsoft’s [...]
About a year ago, I met up with Teresa Wu (of My Mom is a Fob and My Dad is a Fob fame). It was our first “Tweetup”, a word used by social media types to refer to meet-up’s between people who had only previously been friends over Twitter. It was a very geeky conversation [...]
While Moore’s Law may make it harder to be a tech company, it’s steady march makes it great to be an energy-conscious consumer, as one of its effects is to drive down power consumption in generation after generation of product. Take the example of smartphones like Apple’s iPhone or Motorola’s new Droid: Moore’s Law has [...]
While most people will (and should) think of today as the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall (who can forget Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall“?), if you go back a mere five years (rather than 20), today was another fateful day for the Internet: the formal birthday of my favorite browser: [...]
I’ve blogged before about the power of Wolfram Alpha, Mathematica creator Wolfram Research’s powerful online “knowledge engine” which is capable of, among other things, balancing chemical equations, looking up star charts, doing math, and even looking up medical information. But it’s good to know that, despite the sophisticated computational engine which underlies it, Wolfram Alpha [...]