Frank Quattrone, Whiner
Frank Quattrone made his fortune by taking Silicon Valley startups public during the dot-com boom. Even at the time many awkward questions were asked: weren’t most of these companies too small and too...
View ArticleApple vs Google
Apple is worth more than Google. Huh? This doesn’t make sense to me. Let’s start with the obvious: Google makes more money than Apple does. It had earnings of $10 billion over the past 12 months,...
View ArticleWeb Features: Don’t be too Ambitious
The NYT has the news, this morning: BusinessWeek is adding a feature to its website at the end of September. This is clearly meant to be a big deal: it’s the product of "two years of quiet...
View ArticleOpening Brazilian Windows
Brazil has always felt the need to push back against the imposition of international intellectual property rights from the global powers in the US and Europe: it famously simply disregarded TRIPs and...
View ArticleThe WSJ’s Gorgeous Redesign
I love the new WSJ.com. It’s clean, intuitive, elegant, easy to read, and blazingly fast. I should imagine that subscribers will spend a lot more time there now than they were spending up until now,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Information Overload Datapoint of the Day
The Dow swung 780 points between its low point and high point just in the first hour of trading this morning. This is a crazy market, and it’s overloading the information systems: here’s a screencap I...
View ArticleApple Loyalty Datapoint of the Day
As John Gapper notes, the new Taylor Swift album is only $3.99 at Amazon, for an unencrypted, iPod-friendly MP3. At iTunes, by contrast, it’s $11.99 for an encrypted AAC. Yet it’s still the top-selling...
View ArticleIs Google Too Big To Fail?
Robert Cottrell has a provocative post about the cloud today. Is the future of information in the cloud? Robert has his doubts: I’d be on the pro-cloud side, were it not for the crash of cloud banking....
View ArticleKindle 2: Still Expensive
Megan McArdle loves her Kindle, but says that Amazon doesn’t want to have "a glut" of Kindles if the new Kindle 2 fails to sell as well as the original. My feeling is that having too many Kindles in...
View ArticleWhy is the NYT Breaking the Web?
Websites get old, and need to be redesigned occasionally. That we understand. But the first rule of designing a website is that you make sure you can redesign it without breaking all the incoming...
View ArticleWhy Yahoo Shouldn’t Buy Back Its Own Stock
Bill Miller is kicking himself this morning. The second-largest shareholder in Yahoo, he wanted $35 to sell out to Microsoft, and so he held on to his shares rather than hand them over to arbitrageurs...
View ArticleHow to Monetize Free Wi-Fi
Susan Stellin reports today on the way in which hotels, airports and the like are increasingly rolling out free wi-fi in addition to their paid-for offerings. She explains: Travelers want to log on...
View ArticleFalse Positives at Blogger
What’s going on with Blogger? Both Yves Smith and Brad DeLong have run into problems of late, and I have a nasty feeling that it’s an unloved orphan stepchild within Google, and that it’s likely to...
View ArticleGoogle’s Top 10 Universities
Vanity Fair has a wonderful oral history of the internet, full of real gems. About 11,000 words in, we get to Google’s Larry Page: One of the first things we did was just understand the relative...
View ArticleThe Economics of the iPhone
I’ll leave the likes of Dan Frommer to do the big-picture corporate economics of the costs and benefits of changing Apple’s business model. I’m more interested in the user end: if the price of an...
View ArticleFiLife: A Disaster
In case you were wondering why Ron Lieber left the managing editorship of IAC-WSJ joint venture FiLife to become a columnist at the NYT, now you know. FiLife has launched, and it’s a disaster. It looks...
View ArticleDell’s Cunning Business Strategy
Michael Dell on why businesses are going to have to move to Vista eventually: A lot of new hardware features are coming out–broadband, wireless, fast graphics–and those aren’t supported by XP.
View ArticleLet Me Pay to Send Email!
Lee Gomes writes today about the serious problem of false positives when you install a spam filter. It’s a problem I feel particularly acutely: my email address has been floating around the internet...
View ArticleGreat Email Rants of All Time, Windows Edition
This is I think now my favorite email ever. It’s over 1,000 words of ranting about how utterly useless Windows is: I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to...
View ArticleFurther Tales of Microhoo Incompetence
The WSJ reports today not only that some kind of Microsoft-Yahoo deal might be on again, but also that: In mid-May — weeks after Microsoft withdrew its bid — Yahoo offered to sell itself to Microsoft...
View ArticleManaging Your Online Reputation
Kate Murphy has found a chap called Kent Campbell who, for between $500 and $10,000 per month, will try to make sure that the first page of search results, when someone Googles your name, will include...
View ArticleBandwidth Datapoint of the Day
Tim Wu: Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable...
View ArticleComputers in the Oval Office
In England, they call it "silly season": the slow-news days of the summer where newspapers find themselves forced to run faux-provocative opinion pieces, just because there’s nothing else to fill the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Blog Rankings
I’m not a fan of lists, and I’m especially not a fan of top-blogs lists. But I’m kinda tickled by Wikio’s August blog ranking: Hey look, Market Movers is higher up than really great blogs like Wooster...
View ArticleMobile Banking for the Poor
At a press conference this morning in Mumbai, mobile-banking company Obopay announced an alliance with Grameen Solutions — an alliance with an extraordinarily ambitious goal. In ten years’ time, the...
View Article
