Category: Media

  • Batman, Business, and the Incomparable

    How one Batman cartoon from 1992 demonstrates the strategic value of looking for what makes your business impossible to compare to the competition. The most important question in business isn’t “how does your offering compare to the competition?” Instead, the question to ask is “how is your offering incomparable?” What is it about your business that…

  • What’s Next for Apple and Amazon?

    The world’s most valuable company won’t buy Disney anytime soon, but there’s a giant caveat. Plus, what else will the ecommerce giant do with Amazon One, its new biometric payment platform? Being a futurist can be glum when other writers breathlessly announce new-to-them ideas that I’ve been talking about for years while missing the broader…

  • The Hollywood Strikes, AI, Strategy, & Overfocusing

    The organization on the other side of the negotiating table from the striking writers and actors is the AMPTP, but how can one organization represent studios with such divergent interests? The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is a mysterious Hollywood trade association. Its website contains no list of member organizations: just some technical documents,…

  • The Real Social Media

    The algorithmic rabbit holes of Facebook, Instagram, and Snap can isolate us, but could we use both today’s and tomorrow’s digital technologies to connect In Real Life (IRL)? Both in its etymology and our common practice “social media” is oxymoronic, like “jumbo shrimp.” The Latin root socius means ally (or similar words like comrade) and is a shared…

  • Digital Transformation: Three Stories

    The ingredients for Digital Transformation are institutional pain, inflection points, and tools lying around, but you also have to get the people part right. Usually, when we talk about Digital Transformation, we focus on the physical: paper and ink newspapers dissolve and go online; albums become cassettes then CDs then MP3s then streams; physical books…

  • The Monster in My Ear

    How an aural invasion led to a meditation on what makes experiences memorable. What are the ingredients for a memorable experience? One recent event has some clues. My scintillating compadre in nerdery, Benjamin Karney, and I have been friends since we were eight. A few days ago, we had a chance to catch up while he…

  • Apple’s Vision Pro: What Will it Take to Go Big?

    The newest product from the world’s most valuable company will transform the world, but not for quite some time. I’ve been hesitant to write about Apple’s new “spatial computing” device: the thing that the world’s most valuable company doesn’t want to call an Augmented Reality (AR) headset. However, since there are things that I haven’t seen…

  • Why I Wish CNN Had Waited a Day to Fire Don Lemon: Bonus Post

    Here are some handy links for two stories that hit at almost precisely the same moment this morning. Media these days suffers from a weird paradox. On one hand, since Reagan got rid of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s news organizations have not had to present both sides of an issue, which has led to partisan…

  • Keyword: Eventness

    Watching the series finale of “Star Trek: Picard” was a lonely exercise because most of the value of experiences comes from sharing them. Regret seldom punctuates my day-to-day life, but if I had Prof. Peabody’s Wayback Machine handy I would jump back a few days and then schlep up to Seattle or down to L.A.…

  • Musk, Twitter, NPR

    When the Twitter owner and Tesla CEO wrongly labeled NPR as “state-affiliated media” NPR fought back in a powerful way, but it’s only a start. What needs to happen next? Money has no morals. Money erodes morals because it washes away context and specificity in favor of interchangeability. Think about the differences among giving a…