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Platformonomics TGIF #114: January 30, 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 It’s that most magical time of the year: HyperCAPEX season! Meta and Microsoft are in; Amazon and Google report next week. Full annual retrospective to follow (last…
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Oracle BEArs Down
With a $6.66 billion (numerologists take note) unsolicited, all-cash bid for BEA Systems, Oracle further cements their role as the new Computer Associates, i.e. the ecosystem scavenger. BEA seems to have accepted they’re in the endgame, quibbling only about valuation and not their independence. Quick thoughts:The acquisition suggests Oracle’s Fusion middleware may not be quite the juggernaut the…
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IBM Beats Hasty Retreat
The ridiculous IBM “Outsourcing of Services” patent has been withdrawn and magnanimously returned to “the public domain”. Evidently IBM decided in September of 2006 they would stress filing patents with “significant technical content”. They are going to “sharply reduce” the filling of bogus, aka business method patents. The company had no comment on their tens of thousands…
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Patently Nonsense
IBM, whose position atop of the ranks of companies with the most patents awarded each year never quite holds up upon inspection of their actual patents, is offering up another gem.While still not a match for their all-time title holder of absurd patents, the infamous “restroom scheduling” patent (see the story and great headline from CNET), IBM continues…
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The Much Misunderstood Larry Ellison
It is not often I rally to Larry Ellison’s defense. In fact, it has never happened, unless you count that incident involving two underage interns, the failed MiG fighter acquisition and ten thousand cubic yards of Jello, but the legal settlement thereof bars further elaboration. Larry recently made a statement which people are assuming is just a typical, cynical, self-serving, Machiavellian exercise in spin…
