Category: the market
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The stages of competitive grief
The Kubler-Ross model of grief: Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance Surprisingly, this is the same path to subordination that companies take when dealing with competitive innovation. Denial – “This isn’t a viable threat.” Anger – “How dare they?” “How did this happen?” Bargaining – “I need protection from this threat, how much will it cost?”…
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Wireless Ethernet is to cellular Internet like water is to oil
This is what happens if you let a mobile commercial access provider (aka, a cell phone companies) deploy WiFi in their service area: They charge you for WiFi. Think about that. When was the last time you actually paid for WiFi? Free WiFi is everywhere – McDonald’s has free WiFi. My dentist has free WiFi. …
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Fixing a broken Internet
The Internet is broken. We know it is broken. We make money off the fact that is broken, which dis-incentivizes us to fix it. We should fix the Internet despite this.
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The basics of a “slow demand” video service
Several years ago – call it 2004-ish – I spent a fleeting amount of time thinking about how to design a really good set top box that would facilitate a “slow demand” video service. This was around the time that I had permitted four things to enter my life – Netflix’s DVD by mail service,…
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Strategic versus Tactical
With increasing frequency I’m encountering misunderstandings about the difference between strategic and tactical. This is bothersome, tiresome, and frustrating. In many ways those are all my problem, since it is unfair to expect civilians to understand military concepts, but the corporate world is filled with military-isms that just evoke an awful lot of face palm…
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An unsolicted rant about solution selling
begin rant Solution selling is garbage… the entire premise that links the occasionally true assertion that “people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to business problems” with the notion that you can pre-package solutions to those business problems and build a marketing campaign around them is absurd. People are the cause of the aforementioned business…
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Godelian origins of Google’s strategy?
Cheat to win. That is the message I got from frequent readings of Kurt Godel’s essay “On Formerly Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathmatica and Related Systems” over the four years spanning from my junior year in college until the end of my first post-graduate job. Cheat to win, or more accurately, transcend the system to…
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identity, privacy, and technology
Let us agree up front that we (society) suck at all three. Now, what do we do about it? Identity is mostly about accountability and a little bit about trust and non-repudiation. Accountability for what you do is a foundation of a civil society, and without it we don’t really function very well. Knowing who…
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Cookies, certificates, namespaces, and data
I’d like an operating system that lets me control cookies the way it lets me control certificates. What this means is that I want a little hacker window open on the side of my browser that shows me every cookie being requested by a site, every cookie being given to me by a site, and…
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The grid, the box, and the meter
Information utility is all about ubiquitous access to data, which is all about the network, which is all about the balance of what is in the network versus what is on the network, and more explicitly, how that balance is managed – or operationalized, in the lingo of those who deal with such things. Network…