Legend has it that when Steve Jobs was about to make his return to Apple, that he met up with his good friend, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. At that time, Microsoft was the dominant tech powerhouse and Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. Both Oracle and Apple viewed Microsoft as a formidable adversary. […]
Tag: google
Microsoft has several products that are monopolies and hold dominant market share positions: Windows Office Internet Explorer As the Microsoft Empire continues to march on we are beginning to see the chinks in the armor. In the past we have written about The Downfall Of The Microsoft Empire. As we begin seeing increased competition, let […]
With thousands upon thousands of social networks already launched, and more coming in the ongoing social network wars what are reasonable valuations? Is this irrational exuberance? Will the companies that buy them ever make their money back? MySpace was acquired by News Corp for $580m in July 2005. Facebook sold 1.6% of its shares to […]
I wrote a while back about the Downfall of the Microsoft Empire. In that article I wrote about all Microsoft’s competitors and how they were attacking Microsoft on all fronts. I digress, with today’s news that Microsoft made a $44.6B offer to buyout Yahoo, Microsoft may be the downfall of their own empire. That is […]
Bandwidth costs greatly impact profit margins of organizations that deliver enormous amounts of data. Several products and services that are immediately impacted by bandwidth costs are:
The computing platform is what matters. It’s one thing if you’re the big fish with THE platform. But what do you do when you’re the small fish, your competitor already owns the dominant platform, and has millions of customers? How do you switch customers to your platform? Answer: Reduce the platform switching barriers. However, it […]
People seem to think Apple is a big, risk-taking company. That is true, but the risks they take are calculated ones. The switch from IBM PowerPC to Intel x86 chips was a big risk at the time — given the possibility of alienating Apple’s customer base. The risks to branch out their product line from […]
Google Book Search initiative has met some resistance with publishers. Nevertheless, Google has been steadily scanning a significant portion of the world’s books and putting portions of them online to browse and purchase. The significance of this is astonishing. While, the Internet has grown at a rapid pace, much of the world’s collective knowledge lies […]
Microsoft is seeing a monumental, momentum shift. Never before has Microsoft seemed so vulnerable. It is being attacked on all fronts by huge, game-changers. Is this a repeat of computing history? Microsoft changed the scene when they licensed MS-DOS and later Windows to IBM — which was the dominant force, at the time. In those […]
The online advertising market is now finally mature. When the Internet and Web first rose to prominence in the Great Dot-com Bubble of 1995-2001, advertising was everywhere! Even annoyingly so, with pop-ups, advertising bars, etc. Have we returned to the same advertising “irrational exuberance” just 7 years later? Will the advertising market stay or will […]