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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
Today’s post is part of a broader discussion about scale advantages: when they apply and to what degree. I’m addressing this topic in the context of rolled-up entities because, in my experience, it is here that scale advantages seem far too liberally promoted, even if they do sometimes apply with awesome effect. This write-up was […]
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Executive Roundtable: Street Talk (11/9/17), Phocuswright Conference Rachael Rothman, Sr. Analyst, Gaming, Lodging, and Leisure at Susquehanna Financial Group (on hotel demand) “I think we know from the industry-wide data that there is a definite shift to book direct…I would also just highlight that going back 30 years from hotel school, we always thought of […]