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Platformonomics TGIF #142: October 9, 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 Sigh. News Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: Oracle Part II We really can’t expect Oracle to abide by the spirit or letter of the…
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The Italian Cheese Wheel Bailout
The Wall Street Journal reports there is a bull market in at least one commodity: bailouts. I, for one, thought the NASCAR bailout would be impossible to top, but I stand corrected. The world is bailing out banks and car companies. Italy is coming to the rescue of parmigiano cheese. In an effort to help…
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Circling the Drain – Part 5
The newspaper industry continues to draw its bloodbath. It is ugly and unfortunately will get uglier. The New York Times is trying to borrow against its swanky, new building to ease what the Times itself calls “a potential cash flow squeeze as the company grapples with tighter credit and shrinking profits.” Silicon Alley Insider continues…
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What is CitiGroup Smoking?
CitiGroup wrote to customers last week: By nearly all measures, Citi is one the best capitalized financial institutions in the world. Citi has robust and stable operating income, access to funding, strong levels of liquidity and the best talent in the business. After multiple government capital injections amounting to $45 billion and the latest government…
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Circling the Drain – Part 4
Silicon Alley Insider, a frequent source of morbid news about the plight of the New York Times, has morbid news about the local (Seattle) Times: In 2004, newspaper broker Dirks, Van Essen & Murray put the value of the company at $900 million. Two years later McClatchy purchased a 49.5% share of the paper from…
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A Little Sunshine
I’ve been meaning to post on Sun’s latest earnings, but have been delinquent. It is harder to poke fun in light of their thousands of pending job cuts, but my post speaks to the root cause of Sun’s predicament: software. I have often questioned Sun’s software strategy (here and here), going back to the fixation…