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Platformonomics TGIF #121: March 27, 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 Service has resumed. News UnfocusedAI Strategy Du Jour: “We’re an Enterprise Company!” To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go into the enterprise with the team you hired from…
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Pulling Out the Old Playbook
There are a couple of basic business strategies: Obtain more marketshare than anyone else. This should be considered the preferred approach. Failing that, gather up the rest of the also-rans and band together against the dominant player. This approach is usually accompanied by frequent use of the word “open”. If/when that fails, hire some lobbyists because it is…
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Still More IBM Patent Tomfoolery
Some august commentator recently wrote: 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 of patents filed and awarded before that date. Further questions…
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Book Review: Options – Fake Steve Jobs
For the uninitiated, Fake Steve Jobs originated as a blog purportedly written by the CEO of Apple (but whose author was eventually revealed to be Dan Lyons who writes for Forbes), where he shares his inner-most thoughts in a way the head of a public company would never even remotely consider, not even in a world…
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The Future of Advertising Isn’t…
Great piece in the New York Times today on the future of advertising. But it isn’t the dramatic (and oft-discussed) shift from off-line to more relevant and accountable on-line advertising. Rather, it zeros in on the shift of focus and spending to what happens after you’ve found a prospect, because finding a potential customer is just the beginning of marketing’s…
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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…