I recall . . . As an intern sales representative in the pharmaceutical industry leading up to the 2004 Presidential elections the company I was working for had its sales force in a stupor. Everyone was deathly afraid of Kerry being elected. The consensus was that if John Kerry was elected it would mean death [...]
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Why Barnes & Noble Is Not in the Book Selling Business
Second post in the ‘Is Nook a Kindle Killer?’ series by Mikal Lewis. At the conclusion of the last post on Barnes & Noble’s strategy I wrote: What I would do if I was Barnes and Noble: Discover what business you’re in. You’re not in the book selling business. You decided that long ago when [...]
Is Nook a Kindle Killer?
In a word. No. Barnes and Noble execs (hopefully) know it, Amazon knows it. Everyone except for PC magazine knows it. But I don’t blame David Coursey’s cursory commentary, after all someone had to write the obligatory five reasons why… list. Silicon Alley one of my favorite blogs has a good list of reasons explaining [...]
Slow M&A process leaves Sun eclipsed
When I first heard the news Oracle - Sun merger, I had high hopes that given a quick transition there would be some interesting disruptive effects. This immediately threatens IBM who for years have used less expensive, home-grown hardware to propel sales in higher margin enterprise software. Oracle not only acquires the hardware to implement [...]
A principled approach – Part 1
This will be a two part blog series on some exciting news and future blog topics As you can see Mikal and I have been grappling with this notion of aligning our personal and professional goals to fundamentally engage and help people in a transformational way. Every day on the news we hear about the [...]
Indelible
Pepsi’s branding vs. Coca-Cola over the years. Read more to see graphic. via Digg What does it mean to be Indelible? Visionary ● Discipline ● Consistent ● Timeless ● Visionary ● Patient ● Relevant ● Is your business strategy indelible? *the graphic is representative not intended to be taken literally- there have been brand changes [...]
The Goal – Do you know yours?
Building on Justin’s post: Who are you working for? “No, that is not your problem,” he says.”Your problem is you don’t know what the goal is. And, by the way, there is only one goal, no matter what the company.” That stumps me for a second. Jonah starts walking toward the gate again. It seems [...]
Attitude
It's good to be back!! Yesterday I had a very informative conversation with a client of mine with a deep marketing background. The topic centered around "Web 2.0" companies and could small to midsized, non "Web 2.0" companies, borrow some of the same concepts to grow market share and brand awareness, social networking, and focused [...]
The Gold Rush Fallacy: Why Yahoo Will Never Recover
11/3/2019 Update: As time has proven Yahoo! did not end up recovering. However the premise of the Gold Rush is over was disproven through (1) the rise of Infrastructure as a Service: Azure, AWS, Twillio, and Stripe; (2) the scale of Content as a Service: Spotify, and Netflix, Twitch and (3) the rise of Ecommerce [...]
Who are you working for?
While taking a mental break this morning to read my new favorite blog Coding Horror, I came across Jeff's post about UNIX turning 40 years old. While I digested his points about the different closed source, open source and mixed source flavors of *NIX, I was pleasantly surprised when a quote from Joel Spolsky in Jeff's [...]
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