Category: Recommended Reading From Around the Web

Understanding Disruption and How it Can Be Harnessed

Horace Dediu, one of the smarter independent analysts out there in my opinion, wrote a well articulated piece shedding light on how we should understand industry disruption. For those of us who study this industry it is a good read especially toward the end where he articulates in what ways Apple has been and is continuing to disrupt the industry.

Disruption isn’t just about disrupting price nor does it only happen at the low end. This paragraph stuck out to me the most:

The disruption of mobile phones that Apple has foisted on the world through iOS has caused it to reach a point where it dwarves the values of other companies, not just in the sectors it competes, but in all sectors. Some suggest that Apple is an anomaly and does not reflect the economy. To truly understand the state of the economy, they say, means to subtract Apple from it. But I feel this is exactly wrong. Apple is, through the iPhone and iOS ecosystems, defining this era. Just like Microsoft defined an era of increased productivity through the creation of the “knowledge worker”, or like GM re-defined transportation and the notion of the brand in the 50′s, or like IBM re-defined business process efficiency with automation in the 60′s and 70′s, these companies were not anomalies of their era. They were the eras. They were the locomotives of growth that taught other companies how to operate and the contemporary managers how to manage.

Read the whole article here, I highly recommend it.

Read This: Why I Left Google

If you are a technology news addict then you have probably already come across this article called “Why I Left Google” by James Whittaker. It is a very telling tale with some prize quotes about the industry, Google, and social media.

I encourage you to read his article. There are a lot of great insights there. My favorite paragraph was this one:

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

Indeed. There was a time when Google was improving the web. Those days have past, hopefully Google and their employees can recapture that vision. Time will tell but I will hold the breadth of my opinion until Google IO.

The Real Significance of the New iPad

At MobileOpportunity, Michael Mace offers his usual insightful analysis of why the new iPad matters.

The reactions to the New iPad announcement this week were all over the map.

Some places said it was basically a yawner (link), while others bought into the “end of the PC” rhetoric (link) . Some people even warned all developers to stop programming for the keyboard and mouse, even for complex applications like computer-assisted design (link).

My take: I think the announcement was both more and less important than people are saying. Here’s why:

Read the whole column here