2012 Jan 24

Cruise Ships and Smartphones

Finally. RIM's management has stepped aside. After 20 years running Research in Motion, Ltd., from startup to superstar to falling star, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie have stepped aside as co-CEOs and handed the reins to Thorsten Heins, formerly RIM's co-COO. Of course, Balsillie and Lazaridis will remain active Directors, so one wonders how much maneouvring room Heins will actually have, but it may not matter that much. Heins is set to stay the course, and believes in RIM's strategy.

2012 Jan 17

Zappos gets it right

So Zappos was breached. It happens every day, certainly far more often than we hear about in the news, and, I suspect, more often than is reported to the appropriate law enforcement agencies, primarily the FBI cyber crimes unit (whose exact name escapes me at the moment). I have done a lot of work in the cyber security space, in financial and retail, internal corporate and external facing, including compliance with the card industry's official standard for cyber security, the imaginatively-named PCI-DSS.

2012 Jan 11

Reading for business, or just for character development and fun

Today, in the Harvard Business Review blog, Anne Kreamer discussed the exciting new finding that reading books, general books, even (horror) fiction or literature, stimulates new pathways and is beneficial to your social interaction and, by extension, your usefulness to society and the economy. Thus, one no longer need to feel guilty about reading, whether John Keegan's military history or Clayton Christensen's Innovators Series, whether the Great Gatsby or Harry Potter.

2012 Jan 10

HTML5 vs. Native Apps redux

A year ago, I wrote a piece on the tension between HTML5 and Native Apps, especially as it was playing out on mobile devices. The original is here. I found it interesting how the world flocked to the Web to get off of native apps, yet in mobile had flocked to native apps. At least partially, I think that people were actually flocking to the idea of the cloud, rather than the no-distribution (or "

2012 Jan 3

Paul Vixie vs. The Hill

Paul Vixie objected to a response on thehill.com (my response is on page 2 of the comments) to his (and other key Internet engineers') objections to SOPA/PIPA on technical grounds, response by Paul is here. I agree wholeheartedly with Paul on the technical issues - not sure I would publicly try to disagree with Paul on the guts of DNS - but there is a more fundamental issue at stake, specifically the limits of government intrusion vs.

2012 Jan 2

Your Technology Matters - responding to AVC

One of my favourite daily reads is Fred Wilson's AVC at avc.com. I don't always agree with him, but Fred has some great insights, raises interesting issues, and every one of his daily posts has 100+ comments. The community Fred has gathered around his writing is phenomenal. I think if he could find some way to monetize it, he could retire from the VC business, although I strongly suspect he enjoys it too much to do so.

2011 Dec 29

Twitter and the Secon Amendment

A piece on Twitter today made me think of the Second Amendment. Apparently, a Massachusetts DA used a subpoena to get information on some Twitter users, and then made the mistake of asking Twitter not to inform the user. Twitter promptly ignored the request to keep it secret, while still complying with the law by providing the user's info. What does this have to do with the Second Amendment (while steering clear of the politics)?

2011 Dec 21

The decline and fall of software empires

A few months back, Marc Andreessen posited that Oracle was in really big trouble, it just didn't know it yet (at least not publicly). His experiential reasoning: he invests in lots of companies, and is connected to many many more, and not one of them, without exception, uses Oracle. Everyone uses either MySQL/PostgreSQL (i.e. open source) SQL, or NoSQL Mongo/Couch/etc. Yesterday, Oracle's earnings came out, revenue was basically flat, and the share plunged.

2011 Dec 19

CEOs who are hated

I saw a great article earlier this week, listing large tech company CEOs who are most hated by their employees, based on their approval ratings. The article is available here. My first reaction was, "who cares?" A CEO's job, after all, is to work for the owners, not the employees. If s/he delivers value, who cares what employee approval ratings are? On reflection, though, I realized that my attitude was wrong, beyond my not wanting to work for such a CEO.

2011 Dec 15

Why disruption is often so easy

Clay Christensen is famous for his disruption theories. Lately, interestingly, he has been bringing examples of some large companies that have been successful at innovating and hence disrupting themselves. One of the key point so this theory is why existing large players find it so difficult to innovate disruptively, and therefore give opportunity for tiny startups to overturn their markets. Essentially, it is in their DNA, and hence organization structure, projects, budgets and even comp plans, to protect their existing markets and squeeze more cash out of them.