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Platformonomics TGIF #120: March 13, 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 No newsletter next week. Try to amuse yourselves. News Oracle “Beats”: Q3 FY26 Oracle “beat” the number this quarter and Wall Street sent the stock upwards almost…
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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…
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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The ridiculous IBM “Outsourcing of Services” patent has been withdrawn and magnanimously returned to “the public domain”.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…