chapter four – my 30s
Intel, Cisco, Dell, Xerox and many other companies have set up corporate venture capital arms. I did some soul searching on this a couple of months ago, I didn’t get far with it, talked to friends in the VC game, talked to some senior execs, and at the end of the day decided that traditional [...]
I’ve been interested in the concept of business ethics for a long time. The idea that business can operate in a “good” way versus operating in an “evil” way has been revolving in my head for sometime. With Google’s “Don’t be evil” internal motto, MSFT’s reputation as the “evil empire” and a bunch of the [...]
I was amused to see the article “EU to scrutinise Microsoft’s promise to open up Office” on my feed reader today. Not because I wasn’t expecting it – heck, I was wondering what the heck took the EC so long – but because Microsoft was actually trying to do something good, at least in principle, [...]
Umair’s been spending quite a bit of time talking about good and evil, open and closed, Microsoft and Yahoo, and Facebook and Google. A very basic synopsis would be that open is good, Microsoft, and increasingly Facebook, have bad DNA and this will prevent them from sustaining success in the long run. Whereas Google has [...]
During my last job, at a design agency in London, we had a pool table. At 530 everyday, almost like clockwork, 2-4 of us would go and shoot some stick. It was a great semi release, we would end up talking about projects or developments in the world of technology more often then not. When [...]
Acquisitions and strategy Web acquisitions are not strategy. Acquisitions are usually financial gymnastics showing value. Personally, I think when a big company buys a smaller innovative company there’s a good chance that innovation in the acquired company dies. Google was guilty of this with its acquisitions of Blogger (nothing new there, WordPress, six apart innovative), [...]
Henry Blodget and Kara Swisher have two great videos on Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker. On the first they’re discussing the mentality of Google’s founders in comparison to other founders. Their DNA and how they’ve moulded the company in their own image. Basically, how they’ve kept it authentic. My take, well duh, authenticity and value people, authenticity [...]
So Google’s the biggest brand in the UK as well as the world (pdf 800+ kb). To me this signals a huge shift in advertising. I think Umair nailed it when he wrote about interaction being so cheap that building a brand through traditional advertising is no longer necessary. For new technology products interaction is [...]
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Three things I’m thinking about today: 1. It’s kind of crazy that if you build an exceptional brand that gets engrained into people, it’s hard for a competitor to overtake you, no matter how much better the experience is. Inspiration: the fact that Mapquest still dominates the US mapping market 2. Investment into public transport [...]