-
Platformonomics TGIF #137: August 7, 2026
Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads. Get Platformonomics Updates By Email Summer is flying by… News Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: Oracle We’ve written at length about the financial risks of Oracle’s Hail Mary scramble…
Get Platformonomics Updates By Email
-
A Very Targeted Tax Cut
We are in new territory with PC sales in freefall after a new release of Windows and, as some analysts contend, because of Windows 8. Even the Windows Vista “Vistaster” didn’t see PC sales to implode. Discussions of Microsoft are moving beyond product recriminations to the more fundamental. The time-honored strategy of tying new…
-
IBM: How Much Longer Do the Good Times Last?
by mcdlttx I have not written about IBM for a while (or really anything ;-), but one of my recurring themes is IBM’s wholesale transition from what was once the world’s premier technology company (admittedly this was decades ago, but their relative and inflation-adjusted historical dominance is clear) into a financial engineering company.…
-
Change as a Constant
This is a nice illustration of just how much can change in twenty years and how quickly fundamental geopolitical assumptions can collapse: Imagine that you were alive in the summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world. Europe ruled the Eastern Hemisphere. There was hardly a place that, if not ruled…
-
The Rise of the Machines – A Reading List
A recurring theme from this summer’s reading: The Fear Index – Robert HarrisHarris is best known for relatively highbrow historical thrillers spanning ancient Rome to the Second World War but has been inhabiting the present of late. Here he delivers a taut thriller where a quant hedge fund’s black box moves beyond trading the markets…
-
WARMer or Colder?
Here we are, over a year since we last checked in on Windows 8, and the latest aspirant to the Microsoft operating system dynasty continues its slow meander to market. Since our last installment: Apple has shipped over 55 million iPads. I wonder how many versions of the iPad will ship before we see Windows…