Ben Thompson put together a great piece looking at the transition of Microsoft over the last five years. While the company’s embrace of services is no secret, what Ben shows is that this wasn’t a 360-degree shift. Under Steve Ballmer, Microsoft had many of the same assets, but applied them as a way to promote Windows. It shows that their shift is as much a cultural one if anything else.
Stratechery
Apple’s China Problem
The Croesus-like revenue typically seen in Apple’s quarterly earnings can be a little blinding at times. When your revenue is regularly above $40 billion every three months, it’s easy to see single digit fluctuations as rounding errors. But in the end, these large overall numbers can often hide local fluctuations that would otherwise change the narrative around the Cupertino giant. Ben Thompson sees just such a problem in the company’s China strategy.
Ä“ The Dropbox Opportunity
Ben Thompson from stratÄ“chery comments: Benedict Evans, in Glass, Home and solipsism, one of the most insightful posts I’ve read in some time: Your customers’ relationships with you are the only relationships you have as a business and you think a lot about them. But you’re one of a thousand things your customer thinks about […]
The Intel Opportunity
From StratÄ“chery comes an insightful analysis of Intel: Intel’s Identity Crisis, v1 Intel originally found success as a memory manufacturer. It’s 1103 chip was the first commercially available DRAM memory, and the DRAM business led massive growth throughout the 1970s. … Intel was already the best microprocessor design company in the world. They just needed […]