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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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The IBM LBO Continues…
[From last week’s IBM earnings announcement] Revenue up $1.8 billion for the quarter. Hard to tell what organic growth was but probably very low single digits. Repurchased $14.6 billion in stock and the number of outstanding shares down over 6% in the quarter. Debt to fund the buyback up $12 billion in the last six months (up…
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It’s the Balance of Profits, Stupid
More fodder for the irrelevance of trade deficit figures in a piece by Hal Varian in the New York Times via a reader of Greg Mankiw’s blog (whew!) on the contributions of various countries involved in the manufacture of the iPod and the associated accounting in the trade statistics:I found this article by Hal Varian, and a sentence…
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Fog in Cable, Continent Cut Off
24/7, except when it’s not. Geometrically I guess that would be a single line of failure.
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There is No Free Lunch (Continued)
Glass half full view: welcome the occasional capriciousness of cloud services like a snow day.Glass half-empty view: maybe highly centralized architectures that assume everything always works are not the best approach…
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There is No Free Lunch (Especially in France)
The BBC reports the French security service has told French government officials not to use Blackberries because their data is stored in foreign countries and could be susceptible to prying eyes.Expect many more such awakenings going forward to the tradeoffs to putting data in the cloud. Not just national security concerns, but trade secrets, privacy…