Posts tagged business

My guess is a properly modified BP executive could eat a gallon of oil an hour. Now at the rate the oil is flowing into the ocean we would need about 5,000 BP executives eating oil for eight hours a day for the next six years or 100 BP executives eating oil for the next 300 years. Now that is what I call job security…
Alex Bogusky, Genetically modified oil-eating BP executives 

Government Isn't the Problem, Private Enterprise Is: The Global Terrorism of Al Qaeda, BP and Goldman Sachs

Agree or disagree, this is a powerful, worthwhile read.

Non-Apple’s Mistake

A very interesting perspective on what the rest of the computing market has failed to do, and how in (not) doing so, it has handed Apple its current market position.

When the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Clay Shirky, “The Collapse of Complex Business Models”

(via lonelysandwich)

Pandora drives 44% of US internet radio royalties

This, despite constant attempts by record labels and music industry associations to bury them. Pandora’s CEO, Tim Westergren, is on a mission.

Penguin and the iPad

mrgan:

Strong, no-nonsense language from Penguin’s CEO John Makinson:

The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers.
We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do.
The definition of the book itself is up for grabs.

Asked how he felt about Apple’s 30-percent cut:

This is better than the equivalent print agency model, in which publishers let retailers keep 50 percent.

10 Billion Songs Sold in Less Than Seven Years

iTunes Store launched in 2003, with 25 millions songs sold by year-end. By early 2006 the number was 1 billion. By mid-2008 the number was over 5 billion. 18 months later that number has now doubled. Astounding.

Rework — 37signals

Rework — 37signals

After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom — fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals.
Daniel Pink in Seth Godin’s What Matters Now
How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.

Paul Graham, “Apple’s Mistake”

Another credible voice joins the chorus decrying the deeply broken approval process for the App Store. Squandering this kind of intangible asset — the hearts and minds of loyal developers — is a mistake it seems Apple would be far too smart to make. And so I have no doubt that they’re aware of the damage being done, but when leveled against disrupting the now $1.2B+ revenue stream that is the App Store, decision paralysis seems to have set in.