Brutal honesty has come up several times recently in the context of the NYT “exposé” on the Amazon work environment. I don’t have any first hand knowledge of working at Amazon, and I agree that the NYT piece was strangely vindictive. Highly mobile professionals with 6-figure salaries don’t need our protection from Bezos or anyone else. […]

Nick Bilton recently wrote about stratospheric valuations for companies that don’t generate any revenue and there has been much debate on whether or not this represents a bubble. The more interesting thing from my point of view is how the incentives of venture capital encourage consumer-oriented startups to adopt an ad-based1 business model and simultaneously […]

The early mainstream successes of personal computing were products like the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. They ran apps from third parties, and supported third party peripherals, but the devices themselves were designed, engineered, manufactured and distributed by a single company. In other words, the suppliers of these computers were vertically integrated. When the […]

[This post is a transplant from another blog that I have since shut down. I occasionally need to point people to a primer like this one, so I’m reposting it here.] Even as a technical person who has spent most of their career programming or managing programmers, I was pretty confused when I first dipped my toes […]

The debate du jour in tech circles is Android versus iOS. It makes for a great narrative — two big players duking it out, each with their own strengths. The story to date is that iOS took the early lead, but that Android will be the winner in the long run. So goes the conventional wisdom. […]

Everybody in business knows that it is important to focus on few things and do them very well. Right? So why does almost no-one do it? Because it is very hard to do. Specifically, it is very hard to say “no”. Apple is one of the exceptions. It manages to stay very focused on a […]