Archive for 'Flat Out Wrong'

The Myth of Customer Acquisition

How did you “acquire” that customer? Did they make one or more purchases? Did they sign up to your service? Did they give you their email address? Sorry, but that isn’t worth a lot. They will buy the next thing somewhere else. They are already signing up to another service. If your email doesn’t automatically […]

Please Tell Me He Didn’t Actually Say That

This from Paul Graham in a recent Inc. interview when asked for a specific “tell” for poor likelihood of success when assessing YC applicants: One quality that’s a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent. I’m not sure why. It could be that there are a bunch of subtle things entrepreneurs have […]

China Smartphone Share: Demand Side Fundamentals will Beat Supply Side Tactical Advantages

Idiocy in the tech press is particularly acute recently as writers pounce on the news that Samsung now has triple Apple’s share of the smartphone market in China. Let’s break this down. In one corner, we have Samsung, which has been manufacturing and distributing phones for decades. It has relationships with all the mobile operators […]

Technology First Movers do not Market Leaders Make

It feels a bit unfair to pick on one author for mistakes that so many technology writers are making all the time, but this particular article in Forbes is such a great example of the problem that it is impossible for me to resist. The gist of the article is that Apple hardware is falling […]

iOS versus Android: OS Footprint is not a Proxy for Application Footprint

This analysis by Henry Blodget on Business Insider makes the classic (repeated ad-nauseum) mistake of putting Apple in a race they’re not in. Apple does not make a third party OS platform for phones. It makes phones and it makes an application platform for developers. What he is implicitly doing is using OS footprint as a […]

Selling the Impossible

Wrong. And you know that, Accenture. (Photo taken at JFK)