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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…
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Sony and the Joy of Craplets
Delightful to see Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer getting called on the carpet by Walt Mossberg for Sony’s status as the industry leader in craplets. I bought one of the little Sony TZ-series laptops earlier this year and it came with 25 separate “offers”. Many of these “offers” ran as startup processes and some were…
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Forecast: Cloudy, Definitely Not Sunny
I can’t seem to resist commenting on industry anachronisms, but Sun’s latest quarterly disappointment raises a question that I have not seen the commentariat comment upon. How has the MySQL acquisition by Sun impacted the relationship with Sun’s biggest historical partner, Oracle? I may be misjudging Oracle’s leadership, history and culture, but my guess is…
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I, RoboChamp
One of the last things I helped kick off before I left Microsoft was a simulated robotics competition for developers called RoboChamps. The first season of RoboChamps is now underway. Because it runs in a simulated environment, you don’t need actual robotics hardware (which tends to be expensive for the really fun stuff). The first…
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IBM Pulls Late April Fool’s Prank?
“Enterprise-Class Second Life” Some days the jokes write themselves. Did they mean “Second-Class Enterprise Life”? It’s like Second Life, only more expensive, with even fewer people, and minus the interesting bits? Can “Enterprise-Class World of Warcraft” be far behind? “Enterprise-Class Grand Theft Auto”? Imagine the resplendently rendered virtual bus that drives up to your virtual…
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Book Review: The Big Switch
Nick Carr made his name with the provocative Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter” (free version here), its expansion into a less definitively titled book Does IT Matter? and his generally erudite blog. The charge of irrelevance hit the industry hard and elicited mostly incoherent and ineffective rebuttals (e.g. “hogwash”), which hampered real discussion…