Let’s take it back to ’69. The Unix operating system was just conceived under Bell Laboratories, the vaunted research joint venture of AT&T and Western Electric. Protected by the strictures of a consent decree from 1956, which prevented its parent AT&T from commercializing technology that wasn’t related to telephony, Unix thrived as an open research […]
Code Media (2/14/2018; Analyst Michael Nathanson on where media is headed) Michael Nathanson “Over the past 4 years [from 2013 to 2017], the FANG stocks have added $1.4tn of market cap. At the same time, the media industry, the content network industry, the studio industry, has lost about $40bn of market cap. This is one […]
Cimpress is a fine business that has been in search of strategic direction for the last 6-7 years, groping for the right balance between value-added customization and low-cost production. These two sources of differentiation are often at odds because the scale economies required to claim a cost advantage depend on running lots and lots of […]
In 1998 RealPage Communications, an internet hosting service for the commercial and residential real estate industry, merged with Rent Roll, a provider of property management software, giving birth a few years later to the company’s flagship property management SaaS, OneSite. At a time when property managers were still awkwardly fusing disparate general purpose on-premise systems […]
People love their pets. That’s obvious not merely in our impulse to anthropomorphize them but to increasingly care for them the same way we do human members of our families. American pet owners used to really only took their pets to clinics to treat obvious physical symptoms, but they’ve increasingly been hitting up the vet […]
There’s a good reason why Microsoft was dubbed the Death Star by many fearful detractors during the on-premise era: its OS/application stack, with 90%+ desktop share, was an impermeable force that whipped the surrounding computing galaxy into submission. Given Window’s ubiquity, value added resellers and systems integrators optimized their resources and relationships by supporting Windows […]
Countless termites die every day from natural causes, and that makes them the lucky ones. Many are poisoned by liquid pesticide sprayed along entry routes into homes. Still others are duped into ingesting toxic morsules that they share with nest mates, unwittingly wiping out whole colonies, slowly, over months. More creatively (and less commonly), they […]
Looking at TRUP is like staring at one of those ambiguous images that could be both a rabbit and a duck, both a saxophonist and a woman’s face: we know that this is an insurance company, but we’re compelled to analyze it as a data-driven subscription service. Of course, all responsible insurers are data-driven and […]