HP has had to face tough realities this week. Fortunately, there is a way for it to survive: Embrace the inevitable trend favoring “vertical” companies. In the first part of the 2000s, IBM and HP went in two vastly different directions: HP acquired Compaq to bolster a horizontally-integrated PC business, while IBM sold its PC
Good Morning – Would You Like an Apple, Google or Microsoft?
While it comes as a big surprise that Google is buying Motorola Mobility, it is just as surprising that Apple launched a cloud service that will eventually fully compete with Google’s services and Microsoft essentially turned Nokia into its own private Foxconn and will compete with Apple’s devices. All of these moves actually fit economic
Just Like Google and Facebook, Twitter Now Charges Brands to Reach Their Own Customers
You know a web service has reached massive scale when it can charge brands to reach their own customers. Google has been doing it for years, Facebook’s been at it for the past couple of years, and now Twitter has just entered this hallowed territory with its new promoted tweets feature, which lets brands keep
How The Carriers Screwed Themselves Out of Mobile Payments
There has been a huge scrum amongst the smartphone players to capture the market for phone-based purchases. In a very surprising move, the major US-based carriers just folded their mobile payments hand, and folded it hard. Isis, the mobile payment system sponsored by Verizon, AT&T and TMobile, announced that it had signed deals with Visa,
Why Microsoft’s Office 365 will clobber Google Apps
Yes, Microsoft is a slow, lumbering giant. It has been working on cloud for years, with numerous iterations, that took so long cloud proponent Ray Ozzie got fed up and left. Microsoft had to work through cannibalizing reseller arrangements, reconciling how to reach consumers versus businesses and a host of other issues. With Office 365, Microsoft
Google+ could make Twitter the next Myspace
There are numerous comparisons between Google’s new Google+ social offering and Facebook, but most of them miss the mark. Google knows the social train has left the station and there is a very slim chance of catching up with Facebook’s 750 million active users. However, Twitter’s position as a broadcast platform for 21 million active
How Twitter 2.0 Will Make Money – Part Two
This is the second of two articles on likely changes to Twitter. The first article focused on consumer-facing changes to Twitter and this one focuses on monetization. Twitter has experienced tremendous traffic growth, and more importantly has permeated into the collective consciousness with constant Twitter quotes by news organizations and entertainers. Twitter’s valuation has gone