Category: Media

  • The Fragile Glory of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” plus… Why Apple is the right acquirer for Twitter

    Editor’s Notes: Two smaller stories this week If you like these posts, please subscribe to the newsletter version, which has lots of extra goodies and comes direct to your inbox. From the “I was right” department: Was anybody surprised when Elon Musk put his Twitter acquisition on hold? He has already gotten all of the value out…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • How Risk is Changing

    The world seems more dangerous today than it ever has before, but study after study shows that we’re safer now. Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist, and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature are three books that dig into this. In part, life feels more dangerous today because we have so much information about bad things that happen…

  • Why Facebook is Creepier than Google

    A 2/18 article in the Wall Street Journal by Suzanne Vranica, Patience Haggin, and Salvador Rodriguez—Inside Facebook’s $10 Billion Breakup With Advertisers—shows that when it comes to restraining Facebook from tracking us the real power doesn’t lie with the U.S. Federal Government, which is still spinning its wheels on any regulation of Big Tech. (Congressional…

  • Secret Stories: Microsoft, Activision, Spotify, Joe Rogan, Neil Young, Facebook

    When a big business story hits I try to ask myself, “what else is going on?”  When Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, for example, the obvious story was that the ecommerce giant wanted to tap into the nearly $800B annual U.S. grocery business. Less obvious was that by buying Whole Foods Amazon also acquired…

  • Micro-post: Why I miss “Glee”

    The last episode of Glee aired in March of 2015, more than six years ago. I still miss it even though the suds-to-singing ratio got out of whack in the final seasons, so I didn’t watch regularly.  Despite the high school soap opera—or maybe because there’s no escape from high school until graduation for most…

  • It’s time: subscribe to your local paper; turn off your ad blocker. We did.

    We live in Portland, and a few years back we let our subscription to the local paper, The Oregonian, lapse because we just weren’t reading it regularly.  Then came Coronavirus, and suddenly I found myself checking the OregonLive home page daily, multiple times per day. It didn’t take long for the penny to drop: we…

  • Who will create the best streaming video experience?

    At this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, TiVo announced the release of a new gadget, the TiVo Stream 4K. On the surface, the TiVo Stream 4K looks like other “dongles” — Amazon’s Fire Stick, Google’s Chrome Stick, and the Roku Streaming Stick are all examples — that plug into a TV’s HDMI slot…