Category: Strategy

  • On Strategy: the Power of WITDO

    It’s fine to look for answers, but often you don’t find them. Instead, if you’re lucky, you wind up with better questions. WITDO is one of them. One of my first corporate gigs was as the digital editor at EarthLink, an early dial-up Internet Service Provider (ISP). We scrutinized every move that AOL and Microsoft…

  • The End of Cheap Scale?

    More important than who owns Twitter is whether anybody can create a massive new social networking service. Also, what would a non-profit version of Twitter—let’s call it Quack—look like? As I wrote last time, I’m taking a break from the endless hand-wringing around Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. The more interesting question is whether anybody can do anything to…

  • Industry Evolution by Meteor Strike

    Two recent developments in the world of comic books have lessons for all businesses in the age of digital transformation. From the “Big Story You Haven’t Noticed” department: this month, two things happened in the world of comic books that combine to make a huge inflection point. My friend Peter Horan calls this sort of thing…

  • Why Walmart Should Buy Paramount

    Note: I wrote and first published the following column on Sunday, August 14, before the rumors came true the following day: Walmart had signed an agreement with Paramount. You can find a review of that news here. However, nothing about the news changes my argument that Walmart is missing a bigger opportunity, which is the topic of what follows. …

  • The world in April, 2023

    In 2011, my near-future science fiction novel Redcrosse came out. The action was set in 2023, which is just a few short months from now. How clear was my vision? Last week at a film festival, I was trapped in an endless concessions queue that (bonus!) doubled as an internet dead zone. After I had…

  • Elon Musk Still Doesn’t Want Twitter

    Two weeks ago in Musk, Trump, Twitter, and New Media Math I argued that Elon Musk doesn’t really want to buy Twitter: he just wants to use the earned media to help him sell more Teslas. Then, on Monday, to my surprise the Twitter board accepted Musk’s $44 Billion offer, for which Musk had arranged the financing. I thought,…

  • Amazon’s New Pay-With-Your-Palm Tech and its Implications

    If you live in Austin and love experiencing the sharpest edge of technology, then head to the Whole Foods at Arbor Trails. There you can use a new service called Amazon One to pay for your groceries simply by putting your palm on a scanner. Here’s an excerpt from a fascinating piece in last week’s…

  • Musk, Trump, Twitter, and New Media Math

    It’s a good thing for the commonwealth that Elon Musk was born in South Africa; that fact bars him from seeking the U.S. presidency. Otherwise, it’s a sure bet that he’d run as a third party candidate in 2024. He’d win, too. Musk understands the media better than all but one other person. That one…

  • Apple, Alaska Airlines, Taco Bell & Sweetgreen: the Trouble with Subscriptions

    Two recent articles caught my eye about a new vogue for subscriptions for products that are typically transactional.  The first has a misleading title: “Apple Is Working on a Hardware Subscription Service for iPhones” (Bloomberg, March 24th) is misleading because the planned service actually covers all Apple hardware software.  In last Tuesday’s episode of The…

  • Why Amazon Will Buy Starbucks

    I’m not usually one for predictions with due dates. I see the trends, where the dominos are falling, but spotting precisely when a trend will happen is harder. This time, though, I’ll go out on a limb because two events this week have combined to make me think that Amazon will buy Starbucks within the…